Email: hagean03@Luther.edu
Office: 372G Valders
Phone: 563-387-1256

Snapshot

Andy Hageman is joining Luther as an ACM-Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in English and Environmental Studies. After living and working six years in Shanghai, China and then pursuing graduate studies in Bellingham, Washington and most recently in Davis, California, Andy is returning to his native Iowa for this teaching and research opportunity. He will teach an early American Literature course for the English Department this Fall Semester followed by two courses that bring together literary and film studies with ecology as a humanities contribution to the Environmental Studies program.

Research Interests

My current research focuses on intersections of machines, ideology, and ecology in literature and film. My recently completed dissertation, The Hour of the Machine, explores how and why specific machine figures have shaped thought and discourse on social structures and change, labor, and ecology since the Industrial Revolution. The dissertation works with two machine figures: "cog in the machine" and "wheels within wheels." I argue that the patterns and shifts in their transmission from the early nineteenth century to present reveal major formations of thought and discourse as well as significant contradictions within these formations where change may yet be possible. The project functions through a synthesis of quantitative data-based research and traditional close reading interpretations: think of Franco Moretti and Harold Bloom discussing literary history on a factory floor. This hybrid methodology puts close reading analysis in conversation with a material literary history of these machine figures.

More broadly, my research interests include ecocriticism, ecocinema studies, literary theory and history, science fiction, and contemporary novels. At Luther, these interests greatly informed the designing of the courses I am teaching, and I look forward to synthesizing this teaching with developments in my ongoing research activity.

Thoughts on Teaching:

My research and teaching fit together like happy cogs in a machine. I often design courses around materials that bring together matters of technology, culture, history, and ecology as this constellation of issues urgently demands our attention and contemplation. In literature-based courses, I emphasize core close reading and formal analysis reading skills in class, but I also encourage students to bring aesthetics into contact with contexts. My teaching experience ranges from university-level ESL courses at East China Normal University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, both in Shanghai, China, First-Year Composition courses at Western Washington University and UC Davis, Introduction to Literature at UC Davis, and this year I will be teaching an early American Literature survey, an EcoMedia seminar, and an Environment and Literature Course here at Luther.

Currently I am exploring the uses of blogs and other digital media resources to teach various courses. The blog for the Fall 2011 American Literature survey is called “American-Litter-a-Terre” and it has links to each of the students' individual blogs where they post regular short responses and other assignments. My pedagogy, like my research, engages the intersections of literature and technology, and it embodies my commitment to exploring the opportunities and challenges to the production and future of literature as well as English instruction in this era of digital media development.

Publications:

“Ecocinema and Ideology: Do Ecocritics Dream of a Clockwork Green?” The Ecocinema Reader. Eds. Salma Monani, Sean Cubitt, and Steven Rust. New York: Routledge Press (In review/Forthcoming).

“Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and the Challenges of Imagining Ecological Futures.” Science Fiction Studies. (In revision/Forthcoming).

"When Nature Calls; Or, Why Ecological Criticism Needs Althusserian Ideology." Polygraph 22 "Ecology and Ideology" (2010).

“Floating Consciousness: The Cinematic Confluence of Ecological Aesthetics in Suzhou River.” Chinese Ecocinema in the Age of Environmental Visibility. Eds. Sheldon Lu and Jiayan Mi. Hong Kong University Press (2009).

“The Uncanny Ecology of Mulholland Drive.” Scope: An Online Journal of Film & TV Studies. 11 (June 2008).

(with Salma Monani) "Ecological Connections and Contradictions: Penguins, Robots and Humans in Hollywood's 'Nature' Films." Hollywood's Exploited: Corporate Movies, Public Pedagogy, and Cultural Politics. eds. Ben Fryer, Richard Kahn, Anthony J. Nocella II, and Rich Van Heertum. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2010).

(with Sharada Balachandran-Orihuela) "The Virtual Realities of U.S./Mexico Border Ecologies in Sleep Dealer and Maquilapolis." Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture. 5.1 (2011).