Adam Frank’s research and teaching areas include affect theory and poetics in US literature and culture. His essays have appeared in ELH, Criticism, Critical Inquiry, differences, Science in Context, Textual Practice, and elsewhere. He is the author of Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays(Northwestern University Press, 2025) and Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol (Fordham University Press, 2015), and co-author (with Elizabeth Wilson) of A Silvan Tomkins Handbook(University of Minnesota Press, 2020). He has produced a dozen recorded audiodramas in collaboration with composers locally, nationally, and internationally.

Areas of Specialization:

• Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, media, and poetics
• Affect and object-relations theory
• Sound/radio studies
• Feminist science and technology studies

I am currently at work on a project titled “Countertransference and Criticism” that poses the question: Can literary criticism be grounded in a rigorous subjectivism? It turns to the psychoanalytic concept of countertransference, the analyst’s (unconscious) emotional responses to the patient in the clinical encounter, and debates about technique that took place intensively during the 1950s amongst psychoanalysts associated with the mid-twentieth-century British school of object relations. Working with published writings and archival material, and with a specific emphasis on Wilfred Bion’s epistemological writings, this research program seeks to evolve a form of literary criticism grounded in an understanding of the countertransference.

Research networks:

• UBC Graduate Program in Science and Technology Studies
• Gertrude Stein Society
• The Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Foundation
• The Silvan Tomkins Institute

Books:

• Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025. FLYER.
• Co-authored with Elizabeth A. Wilson, A Silvan Tomkins Handbook. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
  Author interviews about this book:
  • Australian Humanities Review 67 (November 2020), 46-54. Interviewer Monique Rooney.
  • Emory University’s Digital Publishing in the Humanities video interview. Interviewer Joey Orr.
  • “Transferential Moments: An Interview with Adam Frank.” Revue française d’études américaines 168 (2021), 97-106. Interviewer Nicholas Manning.

•  Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol. Fordham University Press, 2015.
• Co-edited with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Book Chapters or Journal Articles:

• “Bristle, Delicate, Rescue: On Sedgwick’s Poetics.” differences 37.2 (2026): 162-175.
• With Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Tomkins in Tension.” In Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell, eds., The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worldings, Tensions, Futures. Durham: Duke University Press, 2023.
• Guest edited special issue of Textual Practice titled “Feeling in Time: Radio Free Stein.”
  • With Sophie Barklamb and Tim Elfring. “Introduction: Gertrude Stein’s theatre and the Radio Free Stein project.” Textual Practice 36.12 (December 2022): 1971-1983. [90%]
  • “Gertrude Stein’s radio audience.” Textual Practice 36.12 (December 2022): 2016-2037.
• “Studio Audience: Glenn Gould’s Contrapuntal Radio.” In Inge Arteel, Lars Bernaerts, Siebe Bluijs, and Pim Verhulst, eds., Tuning into the Neo-Avant-Garde: Experimental Radio Plays in the Postwar Period. Manchester University Press, 2021.
• “Sounding Out Stein’s Plays: Exercises in Group Analysis.” In Logan Esdale and Deborah Mix, eds., Approaches to Teaching the Works of Gertrude Stein. MLA, 2018.
• “Reading Literature and Science after Tomkins and Klein.” In Steven Meyer, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Science. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• “The Expansion of Setting in Gertrude Stein’s Landscape Theater.” Modernism/modernity PRINTPLUS 3,1 (March 5, 2018).
• “Feeling.” In Caroline Jones, David Mather, Rebecca Uchill, eds., Experience: Cognition, Culture, and the Common Sense. MIT Press, 2016.
• “Maisie’s Spasms: Transferential Poetics in Henry James and Wilfred Bion.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 17.3 (Summer 2016).
• “Radio Free Stein: Rendering Queen and Country.” In Janet Boyd and Sharon Kirsch, eds., Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein. Lexington Books, 2014.
• “Introducing Radio Free Stein” and “Scenario for Gertrude Stein’s ‘For the Country Entirely: A Play in Letters’.” The Capilano Review 3.22 (Winter 2014), 49-70.
• With Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Like-minded: A Response to Ruth Leys’ ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’.” Critical Inquiry 38.4 (June 2012).
• “Loose Coordinations: Theater and Thinking in Gertrude Stein.” Science in Context 25.3 (September 2012).
•  “Phantoms Limn: Silvan Tomkins and Affective Prosthetics.” Theory and Psychology. 17.4 (August 2007): 515-528.
• “Some Affective Bases for Guilt.” English Studies in Canada 32.1(June 2007).
•  “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy.” ELH 72.3 (Fall 2005). [won the James W. Gargano Award for the outstanding scholarly essay on Edgar Allan Poe for 2005]

Audio Recordings:

• Radio Free Stein. 2013-2019.
• Some Mad Scientists. 2010.
• Overpass! A Melodrama. Alien8 Recordings, 2007.

www.somemadscientists.com | www.radiofreestein.com