Patrick Bixby
Biography
Patrick Bixby (he/him/his) is an associate professor of English in the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.
After earning a BA in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles and a MA in English from California State University, Long Beach, Bixby completed his PhD in English at Emory University in 2003. He served as visiting assistant professor of literature at Claremont McKenna College for one year and then joined the faculty of ASU’s New College in 2004. In 2015, he became resident director of the University Studies Abroad Consortium Summer Program at the National University of Ireland, Galway; in 2017, after stepping down from his post as director of graduate studies, he took up a new role in helping to build partnerships between the New College and Arizona tribal communities, as well as universities around the globe; in 2019, he began serving as the program director of the MA in English program for the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences; in 2021, he became the program lead for the BA in Disability Studies.
Bixby's scholarly interests span a variety of fields. While his research falls primarily under the heading of Irish studies, it also addresses British modernism, postcolonial theory and criticism, Continental philosophy, and issues of travel, mobility, and the body. He teaches courses in these fields and in the history of the novel, the history of film, the history of literary criticism, twentieth-century thought, postmodernism, and methods of interdisciplinary research. He currently serves as vice president of the Samuel Beckett Society.
His essays have appeared in journals including Modernism/Modernity, Modernist Cultures, Irish Studies Review, and the Journal of Beckett Studies, as well as in collections such as A History of Irish Modernism (Cambridge UP, 2019), A History of the Modernist Novel (Cambridge UP, 2015), Beckett in Context (Cambridge UP, 2013), and Beckett and Ireland (Cambridge UP, 2010). He co-edited, with Gregory Castle, Standish O'Grady's Cuculain, a scholarly edition of the Irish historian's writing on the mythic hero (Syracuse UP, 2016); and A History of Irish Modernism, a collection of 24 essays that traces a long historical arc through Irish cultural production from the 1890s to the 1960s (Cambridge UP, 2019). He has just completed work on Unaccompanied Traveler: The Writings of Kathleen M. Murphy (Syracuse UP, 2022).
Bixby has recently finished a book titled License to Travel: A Cultural History of the Passport (U of California P, 2022), which investigates the unyielding paradox of the document: even as it promises independence and mobility, escape and safe haven, the passport also serves as an essential tool of government surveillance and state power, purportedly assuring homeland security and the controlled movement of individuals across national boundaries. The study investigates this paradox by drawing on a range of sources, including ethnographic interviews and personal memoirs, literary history and modern art, archival documents and contemporary journalism, international law and theories of cosmopolitanism. See his Tedx Talk on the topic here.
He is currently completing a book titled Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (Manchester UP, 2022), which examines the circulation of the German philosopher’s ideas in the work of Irish writers and, more broadly, in the Irish public sphere between 1896 and 1923 -- tumultuous years of cultural revival, revolution, civil war, and nation building. By exploring Nietzsche’s thought in this context, the study addresses the problematic notion of Irish modernism, focusing on exchanges between an ostensibly narrow, often conservative nationalist culture, and a more expansive, sometimes radical European perspective in order to offer a new understanding of the intricate cultural dynamics at play in early twentieth-century Ireland.
His first monograph, Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel (Cambridge UP, 2009), set out to revise the Irishman’s reputation as a distinctly “apolitical” and “ahistorical” writer. Placing Beckett’s novels in the context of the newly founded Irish Free State, the study explores for the first time their confrontation with the legacies of both Irish nationalism and British imperialism. In doing so, it reveals Beckett’s fiction as a remarkable example of how postcolonial writing addresses the relationships between private consciousness and public life, as well as those between the novel form and a cultural environment including not only the literary tradition, but also political speeches, national monuments, and anthropological studies.
Education
- Ph.D. English, Emory University 2003
- M.A. English, California State University-Long Beach
- B.A. Psychology, University of California-Los Angeles
Research Interests
- Irish studies
- British modernism
- Postcolonial theory and criticism
- Continental philosophy
- History of the novel
Publications
Monographs:
Samuel Beckett and the Postcolonial Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009.
Reviewed in: Times Literary Supplement (5599), Review of English Studies (253), James Joyce Literary Supplement (24.2), The Beckett Circle (34.1), Modernism/Modernity (18.4), Modern Philology (10.4), and Journal of Beckett Studies (22.2).
Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (manuscript under revision).
Edited Books and Special Issues:
Ed. with Gregory Castle. A History of Irish Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP (under contract and in progress).
Ed. with Sean Kennedy. “(Dis)embodied Beckett.” Journal of Beckett Studies (submitted).
Ed. with Gregory Castle. Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain: A Critical Edition. Syracuse: Syracuse UP (2016).
“Focus: Literary Letters.” The American Book Review 35.1 (November/December, 2013).
Book Chapters:
Co-authored with Gregory Castle. “Standish O’Grady and the Historical Imagination of Irish Modernism.” Eds. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby. A History of Irish Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP (under contract and in progress).
“Cuc(h)ulain in Bronze: the Afterlife of a Republican Icon,” Standish O’Grady’s Cuchulain: A Critical Edition. Eds. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2016. 241-56.
“In the Wake of Joyce: Beckett, O’Brien, and the Late Modernist Novel.” A History of the Modernist Novel. Ed. Gregory Castle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 464-82.
“Ireland: 1906-1945.” Beckett in Context. Ed. Anthony Uhlmann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 65-75.
“Beckett at the GPO: Murphy, the National Imaginary, and “the Unhomely.” Beckett and Ireland. Ed. Sean Kennedy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 78-95.
“From the Postcolonial to Globalization: Rushdie’s Later Novels.” Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Ed. Reena Mitra. New Dehli: Atlantic, 2006. 119-131 (reprint of “Writing Back to the Postcolonial: Rushdie and the Global Aesthetic,” see below).
“Perversion and the Press: Victorian Self-fashioning in Joyce’s ‘A Painful Case.’” A New and Complex Sensation: Essays on Joyce’s Dubliners. Ed. Oona Frawley. Dublin: Lilliput, 2004. 112-121.
Refereed Articles:
“‘This… this… thing’: the Endgame Project, Corporeal Difference, and the Ethics of Witnessing” (forthcoming in The Journal of Beckett Studies).
“‘Frightful Doctrines’: Nietzsche, Ireland, and the Great War” (forthcoming in Modernist Cultures).
"Becoming ‘James Overman’: Joyce, Nietzsche, and the Uncreated Conscience of the Irish.” Modernism/Modernity 24.1 (January 2017): 45-66.
“The Ethico-politics of Homo-ness: Samuel Beckett’s How It Is and Casement’s Black Diaries.” Irish Studies Review 20.3 (August 2012): 243-261.
“Watt Kind of Man are You?: Beckettian Anthropology, Cultural Authenticity, and Irish Identity.” Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15 (Dec. 2005): 71-86.
“Beckett’s Book of Youth: Bildung and the Nation-Space in Dream of Fair to Middling Women.” Foilsiú: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Irish Studies 4.1 (Spring 2004): 109-121.
“Writing Back to the Postcolonial: Rushdie and the Global Aesthetic.” The Atlantic Literary Review 2.4 (Dec. 2001): 178-189.
Reviews, Journalistic Pieces, Occasional Essays, and Reference Works:
Review of Irish Cosmopolitanism: Location and Dislocation in Joyce, Bowen, and Beckett (Florida UP, 2015) by Nels Pearson. Twentieth-Century Literature 63.2 (June 2017) 220- 227.
“The Show Must Go On: Dan Moran, Chris Jones, and The Endgame Project,” Southwest Parkinson News (Spring 2017) 1-2, 15.
“Always Galway, but especially in July,” The Desert Shamrock 28.2 (March-April 2017) 28.
“Dublin 1916 … Phoenix 2016,” Estudios Irlandeses 12 (2017) 174-78.
Review of The Poor Bugger’s Tool (Oxford UP, 2012) by Patrick Mullen. The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 38 (2015) 321-323.
Review of Beckett’s Art of Absence: Rethinking the Void (Palgrave, 2011) by Ciaran Ross. The Journal of Beckett Studies 24.1 (2015): 138-142.
Review of Scandal Work: James Joyce, the New Journalism, and the Home Rule Newspaper Wars (U of Notre Dame P, 2013) by Margot Gayle Backus. Journal of British Studies 53.4 (October 2014): 1062-64.
Review of A Handbook of Modernism Studies (Blackwell, 2013) edited by Jean Michel Rabaté. Symplokē 22.1-2 (2014): 456-58.
“Not-So-Dead Letters” (invited 1500 word introductory essay). The American Book Review 35.1 (November/December 2013): 3.
“British Culture at Mid-Century: War Writing and Intermodernism.” (invited 4000 word review essay) Studies in the Novel 43.2 (Summer 2011): 258-66.
“Friedrich Nietzsche.” (invited 3000 word encyclopedia entry). The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory. Eds. Michael Ryan and Gregory Castle. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011.
“Much ado About Nothing.” (invited 4000 word review essay). The James Joyce Literary Supplement 20.2 (Fall 2006): 8-9.
“Samuel Beckett Centenary Prompts Closer Look.” Loose Canons 9.1 (Mar. 2006): 5, 8.
“Yeats’s Inscription to Lady Gregory, Wind Among the Reeds.” Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 2001. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Detroit: Gale, 2002. 186.
Courses
| Summer 2022 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 365 | History of Film |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| MAS 598 | Special Topics |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Spring 2022 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 222 | Survey of English Literature |
| IAS 494 | Special Topics |
| ENG 494 | Special Topics |
| MAS 505 | Theory Change, Culture & Mind |
| Fall 2021 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| ENG 478 | Studies in Modernism |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Summer 2021 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| ENG 591 | Seminar |
| ENG 597 | Graduate Capstone Seminar |
| MAS 598 | Special Topics |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Spring 2021 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 365 | History of Film |
| HON 493 | Honors Thesis |
| ENG 494 | Special Topics |
| IAS 494 | Special Topics |
| MAS 505 | Theory Change, Culture & Mind |
| Fall 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| ENG 494 | Special Topics |
| ENG 560 | Genre Studies |
| Summer 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| MAS 598 | Special Topics |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Spring 2020 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 222 | Survey of English Literature |
| ENG 365 | History of Film |
| Fall 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| MAS 590 | Reading and Conference |
| Summer 2019 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| MAS 598 | Special Topics |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Fall 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 365 | History of Film |
| Summer 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 400 | History of Literary Criticism |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
| Spring 2018 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| MAS 505 | Theory Change, Culture & Mind |
| MAS 585 | Capstone Course |
| ENG 597 | Graduate Capstone Seminar |
| Fall 2017 | |
|---|---|
| Course Number | Course Title |
| ENG 478 | Studies in Modernism |
| ENG 598 | Special Topics |
Service
- MA in English Advisory Committee, Committee Member (2014 - Present)
- Interdisciplinary Global Learning and Enhancement Advisory Board, Board Member (2014 - Present)
- N/A, N/A (2014 - Present)
- Graduate Deans Advisory Group (Office of Graduate Education), Member (2013 - Present)
- Graduate Deans Advisory Group (Office of Graduate Education), Member (2013 - Present)
- MA in Social Justice & Human Rights Curriculum Committee, Member (2013 - Present)
- MA in Social Justice & Human Rights Events and Fundraising Committee, Member (2013 - Present)
- Arizona Course Equivalency Tracking Sytem, Evaluator (2013 - Present)
- Arizona Course Equivalency Tracking Sytem, Evaluator (2013 - Present)
- SHArCS Director Search Committee, Member (2013 - Present)
- Oxford University Press, Anthology Evaluator (2012 - Present)
- School of English, Drama, and Film at University College Dublin, External Examiner (2012 - Present)
- General Studies Council, Council Member (2012 - Present)
- General Studies Council, Council Member (2012 - Present)
- Online Course Fees Committee, Committee Member (2012 - Present)
- SHArCS Executive Advisory Board, Board Member (2012 - Present)
- University Graduate Council, Council Member (2012 - Present)
- University Graduate Council, Council Member (2012 - Present)
- Eighteenth-Century Literature Search Committee, Member (2011 - Present)
- SRCA Grant Review Committee, Member (2011 - Present)
- Graduate Curriculum Committee, Member (2010 - Present)
- MA in Interdisciplinary Studies (MAIS) Program, Director (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Admissions Committee, Member (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Admissions Committee, Member (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Admissions Committee, Member (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Admissions Committee, Member (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Admissions Committee, Committee Member (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Curriculum Committee, Head (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Curriculum Committee, Head (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Curriculum Committee, Head (2010 - Present)
- MAIS Curriculum Committee, Committee Member (2010 - Present)
- Graduate Curriculum Committee, Committee Member (2010 - Present)
- Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences., manuscript reviewer (2009 - Present)
- Program Coordination Committee, Representative (2009 - Present)
- Program Review Committee, Member (2009 - Present)
- Program Review Committee, Member (2009 - Present)
- Program Review Committee, HArCS, Member (2009 - Present)
- Program Review Committee, HArCS, Member (2009 - Present)
- MAIS Advisory Group, Member (2009 - Present)
- HARCS Curriculum Committee, English Program Representative (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - Present)
- Online Education Group (OLEG), Member (2008 - Present)
- English Department -- Tempe, Search Committee Member (2007 - Present)
- Consultant to the Editors (2003 - Present)
- Samuel Beckett Society, Lead Conferene Organizer (2014 - 2015)
- Cambridge University Press, Book Manuscript Reviewer (2014 - 2014)
- Tenure Peer Review Committee for Dr. Sharon Kirsch, Chair (2014 - 2014)
- MA in Social Justice & Human Rights Curriculum Committee, Member (2013 - 2014)
- SHArCS Director Search Committee, Member (2013 - 2014)
- University Graduate Council, Council Member (2012 - 2014)
- Graduate Curriculum Committee, Chair (2010 - 2014)
- Online Education Group, Member (2008 - 2014)
- MA in Social Justice & Human Rights Events and Fundraising Committee, Member (2013 - 2014)
- MAIS Curriculum Committee, Head (2010 - 2014)
- Irish Research Council, Referee (2013 - 2013)
- Online Course Fees Committee, Committee Member (2012 - 2013)
- University College Dublin, School of English, Drama, and Film, External Examiner (2013 - 2013)
- SHArCS Executive Advisory Board, Board Member (2012 - 2013)
- Program Review Committee, HArCS, Member (2009 - 2013)
- 19th-Century American Literature Search, Chair (2012 - 2013)
- University of South Carolina Press, Book Manuscript Reviewer (2012 - 2012)
- Cambridge University Press, Book Manuscript Reviewer (2011 - 2012)
- Northwestern University Press, Book Manuscript Reviewer (2012 - 2012)
- The Journal of Beckett Studies, Journal Referee (2011 - 2011)
- Graduate Recruitment Team, College Representative (2011 - 2011)
- HARCS Curriculum Committee, Member (2008 - 2011)
- The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, Journal Referee (2011 - 2011)
- Program Coordination Committee, Representative (2009 - 2010)
- MAIS Advisory Group, Member (2009 - 2010)
- Palgrave-Macmillan, manuscript reviewer (2009 - 2010)
- RMMLA, Chair: Annual Beckett Panel (2007 - 2007)
- Writing Outcomes Committee, Member (2007 - 2007)
- Irish Cultural Center, Guest Lecturer (2006 - 2007)
- Faculty Assembly, New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, Parliamentarian (2005 - 2006)