Brian Jansen
Brian Jansen, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication and Journalism / Department of English
430 Dunn Hall
University of Maine
Orono, ME 04469
Phone: (207) 581-1938
E-Mail: brian.jansen@maine.edu
Brian Jansen (he/him) is assistant professor at the University of Maine with a joint appointment between the Department of Communication and Journalism and the Department of English. A graduate of the University of Calgary with a PhD in English literature, Brian is a media studies and literary scholar in the qualitative critical cultural studies tradition, with an interest, broadly, in questions of “work” or labor–how we depict it, how we talk about it, how we find it fulfilling (or not). His work considers aesthetic production at the intersection of labor and capital, as well as the politics of American professional wrestling as a live performance artform which exists uneasily at the intersection of sport, theatre, stunt work, and serialized television. In particular, he is interested in pro wrestling as a lens for considering the tensions inherent in neoliberalism as a political project: the private sphere’s erosion of public life, the uneasy alliance of market-first and social conservatism, and the challenges of care work.
Brian has published on David Foster Wallace, George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joshua Ferris, and Vladimir Nabokov, and young adult literature, with his work appearing or forthcoming in Comparative American Studies, the Canadian Review of American Studies, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, ESC: English Studies in Canada, the Journal of Popular Culture, the European Journal of American Studies, and other venues.
Selected Publications:
“‘The End of a Bright and Tranquil Summer’: Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End and the Refusal of 9/11 Representations.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, vol. 46, no. 1, 2020, pp. 103-27. doi:10.6240/concentric.lit.202003_46(1).0006.
“‘Oddly Shaped Emptinesses’: Capital, the Eerie, and the Place(less)ness of Detroit in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Virgin Suicides.” Comparative American Studies: An International Journal, vol. 16, no. 3-4, 2019, pp. 101-15. doi:10.1080/14775700.2019.1667695.
“‘It’s Still Real to Me’: Contemporary Professional Wrestling, Neoliberalism, and the Problems of Performed/Real Violence.” Canadian Review of American Studies, 2019, doi:10.3138/cras.2018.024.
(with Hollie Adams) “Good Work and Good Works: Work and the Postsecular in George Saunders’s CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2018, doi:10.4000/ejas.13191.
“‘Yes!’ ‘No!’ . . . Maybe?: Reading the Real in Professional Wrestling’s Unreality.” Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 51, no. 3, 2018, pp. 635-56.