Dustin Friedman

Dustin Friedman is Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, D.C. He is also co-director of the M.A. in Literature, Culture, and Technology and affiliated faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.

His fields of research and teaching are Victorian and modernist literature, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing.

His book Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) explores the intersection between artistic experience and homoerotic desire in the writings of aesthetes such as Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), and the Michael Field poets (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). He is also co-editor, along with Kristin Mahoney (Michigan State University), of the collection Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). Recently, he has begun work on a project that examines aestheticism, race, and alternative humanisms at the Victorian fin de siècle and beyond.

Friedman’s writings have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals Victorian Literature and Culture, Modernism/modernity, Victorian Studies, Pedagogy, Feminist Modernist Studies, jml: Journal of Modern Literature, ELH, Studies in Romanticism, Literature Compass, and Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism, as well as in the Oxford Handbook of Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), the Cambridge Companion to Walter Pater (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), and Called to Civil Existence: Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Rodopi, 2013).

He has presented his work at conferences in Rome, Hong Kong, Auckland, London, York, and throughout the United States and Canada. He previously taught in the department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore and in the department of English at UCLA, where he also taught courses in LGBT and Gender Studies.

More information can be found on his faculty profile page.