Adam J. Frank
Thematic Research Area
Period/Nation Research Area
Education
BA, Brown University
Duke University, PhD
About
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, 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.
Teaching
Research
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 “Mad Science, or a Survey of Motives for Criticism” that explores the role that affect and object-relations theory may play in grounding a “science” of literary criticism. The project unfolds a counter-transferential method that attends to the critic’s affective states as these index motives and phantasies that can be analyzed in historical, socio-political, and conceptual context. Structural aspects of “subjectivity” serve to ground critical practices in a rigorous subjectivism. I have given several papers on this project at the MLA, 4S, ACLA, and invited presentations at Université de Grenoble. I am currently preparing an essay on Mary McCarthy for a special issue of Textual Practice.
Research networks:
Publications
Books:
- Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2024. 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:
- 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.