Jonathan Flatley

I am a comparativist whose writing and teaching focuses on American, African American, French and Russian literature and art. Most broadly, my research concerns collective emotion as it takes shape in aesthetic and political forms. Increasingly, my work also considers how aesthetic practices themselves exert power by creating ways of feeling and modes of belonging and, in so doing, help to form groups capable of collective action. Motivating this work is my guiding sense that collective feeling is the (still relatively undertheorized) basis for collective political action.

My first book, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard, 2008), considers modernism’s relationship to the experiences of modernity through its preoccupation with loss. It argues that not all melancholias are depressing, and it pursues this claim through its examination of a group of texts in which an attachment to loss becomes the very mechanism for being interested in the world and in others. Like Andy Warhol (Chicago, 2017), argues that Warhol’s enormous and diverse body of work can be understood as part of one ambitious ongoing project: “liking things.”  Instead of the cynical affirmation of consumer society that some see in Warhol’s art, I find in Warhol’s promiscuous liking a utopian impulse, an effort to imagine and create new, queer forms of emotional attachment based on likeness and liking. 

I am currently finishing a book called Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter- Moods Are Made. This book is about the formation of Black revolutionary moods, those moments when otherwise discouraged, alienated, depressed, or isolated people come together to form energetic, hopeful, and demanding collectives for whom victory against white supremacy feels possible.  It identifies a particular Black radical tradition, which, in addressing the problems of group formation and collective feeling, picked up on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and made use of them within existing Black political protocols.  In 2022-2023, with the support of a Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellowship, I began to work on a new research project about liking and being like trees.

I have always enjoyed teaching classes in a range of areas: in modernism, contemporary literature, cultural studies, 19th and 20th Century American and African American literature, queer studies, aesthetic theory, affect theory, the novel, and Marxism.  In Winter 2025, I’m teaching Media Aesthetics, Queer Theory and Queer Practices, and in Spring 2025 I am offering a classes on the Aesthetics of Agitation and Propaganda, and on Affect and Theory. 

• “Like Trees,” in Love, Etc. (University of Virginia Press) ed. Rita Felski and Camilla Schwartz, 2024
• “On Implicatedness as a Political Feeling” Parallax, 2024.
• A Dossier on the Hinterlands, threefold, issue no. 14, Spring 2024. https://threefoldpress.org/wymmdossier
• “Everybody Hates the Police: On Hatred for the Police as a Political Feeling,” The Long 2020, ed. Richard Grusin and Maureen Ryan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 2022.
• “Unknown Parabolas” Chelovek (Moscow: Institute of Philosophy), Special Issue in honor of Valery Podoroga.  2021.
• “Picturing the World of the Communist Black International,” The Wayland Rudd Project, Yevgeny Fiks (New York: Ugly Duckling Press, December 2020).  Fall 2021.
• “My Hustler” and “My Hustler II,” Catalogue Raisonne of the Films of Andy Warhol (New York: Whitney Museum), 2021.  
• “1968 Decentered” Special issue co-editor, with Robert Bird.  South Atlantic Quarterly Spring 2020. 
• “Liking Andy Warhol: An Interview with Jonathan Flatley,” by Felix Bernstein, Los Angeles Review of Books, July 20, 2018. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/liking-andy-warhol-an-interview-with-jonathan-flatley
• “’Beaten, But Unbeatable’: Langston Hughes’s Black Leninism,” Comintern Aesthetics, ed. Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee, University of Toronto Press, March 2020.
• “’A Thousand Years’ of Zoe Leonard,” Public Books, June 15, 2018. http://www.publicbooks.org/a-thousand-years-of-zoe-leonard/
• “(Radio On!)”  Avidly, A Los Angeles Review of Books Channel, January 24 2017. http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2017/01/24/radio-on/
• “What is a Revolutionary Setting?” Cluster on Setting on the Modernism / Modernity Print Plus platform, ed. Hannah Freed-Thall and Dora Zhang, Winter 2017
• “Reading for Mood,” Representations 140 (Fall 2017), a special issue on “Fallacies”
• “Refreshments of Revolutionary Mood,” Literary/Liberal Entanglements: Toward a Literary History for the Twenty-First Century, ed. Corinne Harol and Mark Simpson, University of Toronto Press, Fall 2017
• Like Andy Warhol.  University of Chicago Press, December 2017 (paperback 2022).
• “Just Alike,” Social Text 121, Special Issue for José Esteban Muñoz, Fall 2014
• “Warhol’s Aesthetics,” co-authored, with Anthony E. Grudin, “Andy Warhol” Special Issue, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, 56.3. (Summer 2014)
• “How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood is Made,” New Literary History, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2012), “In the Mood” Special Issue
• “’Unlike Eve Sedgwick,’” Criticism, Vol. 52, No. 2. Spring 2010, “Honoring Eve” Special Issue (published Winter 2011)
• “Like: Collecting and Collectivity,” OCTOBER 132 (Spring, 2010)
• Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
• “Moscow and Melancholia,” Social Text Spring 2001
  —Translated into Russian, Logos: Philosophical and Literary Journal #5-6, 2000 (Moscow)
• “Art Machine” in Nicholas Baume ed. Sol LeWitt:  Incomplete Open Cubes, Wadsworth Athaneum. MIT Press, January 2001
• Pop Out: Queer Warhol. Co- Editor with Jennifer Doyle and José Muñoz. Duke University Press, 1996.
• "Warhol Gives Good Face: Publicity and the Politics of Prosopopoeia" Pop Out: Queer Warhol.  Duke University Press, 1996