Assistant Professor
Department of English
1115 East 58th Street
Chicago, IL 60637

Office: Walker 404
Phone: (773) 702-0192
adrienneb@uchicago.edu

I specialize in American and African-American cultural production in the 20th century. I am currently exploring the influence of architecture and urban planning on literary form alongside the ways that narrative intervenes in our historical and experiential understandings of space. My work also considers a range of objects beyond the literary, considering the ways TV shows hear, journalists see, and class may be felt, and analyzing race's sonic and spatial dimensions.

I am working on a book recovering the skyscraper's central role in structuring American social and aesthetic perception in the early twentieth century. Attending to both the skyscraper's fraught presence in canonical texts as well as the structure's remarkable presence at Modernism's generic borders, this project explores how an array of writers approached the skyscraper as a radical instrument of perception that was transforming modernity's modes of seeing.

Courses

Graduate: Modernism and Gender in Black and White

Undergraduate: Media Aesthetics; Representing Poverty

Selected Publications

• Co-editor with Kim Lane Scheppele and Valerie Smith, Race and Real Estate (forthcoming). This is an interdisciplinary collection of essays rethinking narratives of property and citizenship.
• "Between the Mythic and the Monstrous: The Early Skyscraper's Weird Frontiers." Journal of Modern Literature (Fall 2011)
• "Constrained Frequencies: The Wire and the Limits of Listening." Criticism (Summer and Fall 2010)
• " 'My Hole is Warm and Full of Light': The Sub-urban Real Estate of Invisible Man." In Race and Real Estate (in preparation)

Education

Ph.D., Princeton University, 2011. Teaching at Chicago since 2011.