Andrew Ball
Affiliated Faculty, School of Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Dr. Andrew Ball is an interdisciplinary scholar and cultural theorist who specializes in literature, philosophy, and film. His work focuses on the cultural practices of marginalized groups in the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, class, religion, and the interface of art and science. His current research and teaching interests include horror literature and film, feminism in popular culture, LGBTQ+ literature, and cultural responses to the AIDS crisis.
In his book on the social construction of salvation, The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption (Bloomsbury, 2022), Dr. Ball examines how material conditions influence religious ritual and concepts of the sacred.
He is the author of The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890-1894 (University of Alabama Press, 2024), and Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in American Popular Media: Who Was That Masked Woman? (with Gregory Bray, Routledge, 2025) which examines how anti-heroines were represented in media from the post-Civil War era through World War II.
Dr. Ball is also the editor of Screen Bodies: The Journal of Embodiment, Media Arts, and Technology (Berghahn), a field-leading publication that examines the relationship between bodies and screens from cinema and television to virtual reality, social media, gaming, and the visual arts.
Dr. Ball’s scholarship has appeared in Philosophy and Literature, Religion & Literature, Literature and Theology, American Literary Realism, Studies in American Fiction, the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Parrhesia, and Soundings, among other publications.
He is president of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Society and the William Dean Howells Society.
Courses
- First Year Seminar: Making Monsters
- First Year Seminar: Culture the Arts and Social Change
- First Year Seminar: American Popular Culture
- Directed Study
- Feminist Cultural Theory
- Interdisciplinary Studies Senior Capstone
Academic Work
- 2025, Women Vigilantes and Outlaws in American Popular Media: Who Was That Masked Woman? New York: Routledge
- 2024, The Essential Lectures of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1890-1894, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press
- 2022, The Economy of Religion in American Literature: Culture and the Politics of Redemption, London: Bloomsbury
- 2023, “Queering the South: Adolescence and Triangular Desire in the Gay Novel 1940-1949,” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 36.1
- 2021, “The Dance of the Semantic Phoenix: Autopoietic Systems of Meaning in Finnegans Wake,” Philosophy and Literature 45.1
- 2021, “Voicing Ineffability: Theological Modernism and the Expression(ism) of Faith in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 104.1
- Winter 2020-2021, “Revolutionary Love: Kierkegaard’s Gift Economy as a Religious Corrective to the Leveling of the Public Sphere,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 20.1
- 2020, “‘Salvation through socialism’: Conversion in the Work of Jack London and Upton Sinclair,” Studies in American Fiction 47.2
- 2020, “Redemptive Mourning: Virginia Woolf’s Transformation of the Elegiac Form,” Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 43.3
- 2020, “The Jesus Business: Flannery O’Connor and the Economy of Redemption,” Literature and Belief 40.1