J. Brandon Pelcher is Affiliated Faculty for Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College and Lecturer of German for International Literary & Cultural Studies at Tufts University. His research and teaching interests include the historical avant-garde, especially Dadaism, eco-critical thought particularly eco-feminist posthumanism and theories of environmental media, Marxist media theory, theories of the commodity and its consumption, and Black cultural history in Europe.
His first book, Dada's Subject & Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023), reads Dadaist appropriation and redeployment of ostensibly "innocent" media (typography, photography, commodity forms/aesthetics) and genre (poetry, manifesto) as subversive performances of stable ideological subject formation.
His current book project, Commodity-Ecology: Environmental Matters in the Capitalocene, exposes the ideological organization that separates commodities from material "nature" and explores the human/consumer encounter with the environment as an experience with, through, and as a commodity. Viewing commodities as eco-media reveals the capitalist construction of a now post-human and post-nature apparatus that further facilitates consumption.
Research from these projects has been published in Bloomsbury, Gegenwartsliteratur, Modernism/Modernity, Monatshefte, Seminar, and Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature.
About
- Department Visual & Media Arts
- Since 2024
Areas of Expertise
- Environmental Studies
- Film
- Humanities & Cultural Studies
- Literature
- Media Studies
- Photography
- Visual & Media Arts
Publications
Re-Emergent Wilderness and Waste: Matter in the Time of the Capitalocene
2024Gegenwartsliteratur: Utopie – Dystopie – Zukünftigkeit (October 2024), 111-129
Green Dada: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Ecocritical Theory
2024Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 60.3.1 (September 2024), 191-209
Dada's Subject & Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly
2023Environmental Kitsch: Commodity-Ecology in Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Tand’
2022Höch’s Weimar & Wilhelm: Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Re-Framing
2021Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (2021), 89-101
Bloomsbury series Methuen Drama Engage, eds. Julia Listengarten & Yana Meerzon
Ideology with an /i/: Reading Dada with Kurt Schwitters
2020Being and the Madeleine: Forgetting in Heidegger, with Proust
2019Comparatio: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 11.2 (2019), 211-228
“Window Shopping with Duchamp: Commodity Aesthetics Delayed in Glass”
2019Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature, 43.2 (2019), Article 35