Dr Andrew Goldstone

Andrew Goldstone is a scholar of twentieth-century literature in English. After an undergraduate degree in physics and mathematics from Harvard, he switched to English for the PhD (Yale, 2009). He has taught at Stanford, New York University, and the New School; since 2012 he has been on the faculty at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where he is currently an Associate Professor of English. He is principally interested in the social lives of literature, from avant-garde works to popular genre fictions: how do institutions and social forces shape individual texts? How do literary forms and categories themselves act in society?

His monograph, Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man, was published by Oxford University Press in 2013. His subsequent work has used computational and book-historical methods, with articles on quantitative approaches in the digital humanities and on reading and publishing in the global Anglophone field. His current book project, “Genre Fiction: A Subliterary History,” is a study of the system of popular-fiction categories, including genres like mystery, romance, and science fiction, which has organized a large part of fiction-production and reading since the early decades of the twentieth century. Using sociological and book-historical approaches, he seeks to explain the genesis and surprising durability of this system in the USA and the UK, by emphasizing the varying uses of genre by magazine and book publishers, readers, writers, reviewers, library catalogers, and others.

While visiting at Clare Hall, his research focuses on the uneven institutionalization of genre categories in British fiction following the Second World War and on more recent transformations in transatlantic genre publishing.

At Clare Hall, Andrew is accompanied by his wife, Anne DeWitt, also a Visiting Fellow; she is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU–Gallatin and a scholar of Victorian literature and the history of science.