Brandon Pelcher

J. Brandon Pelcher’s 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.