Associate Professor of English

(Fall 2025)

It’s old news that capitalism is a global system with profound effects on our daily lives, but what does it mean to grasp capitalism as a planetary phenomenon? My book project, Fear of a Red Planet, brings together Marxist critical theory and speculative fiction to understand how capitalist social relations shape the Earth and how the Earth structures human society and culture. For the Earth is more than a container in which human society takes place. It’s a geophysical system, an ecological web, and a biochemical stew blurring distinctions between society and nature. I argue that Marxist critical theory, stretching back to Marx’s early (1844) manuscripts, offers a privileged resource for theorizing and analyzing the ecological dimensions of capitalism. In doing so, I build on recent work by the likes of Jason W. Moore, Andreas Malm, and Stefania Barca, drawing out the aesthetic and cultural implications of concepts such as social metabolism, species-being, and ecological class. That’s the theoretical side of the project, comprising the first half of the book. The second half of the book consists of case studies of speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, the weird). One chapter looks at stories of terraforming and geoengineering, showing how a critical tradition of science fiction, running from Robert Heinlen to Kim Stanley Robinson, N. K. Jemisin, and Annalee Newitz, challenges the fantasy of endless capitalist expansion across interstellar space. Another chapter examines the horror of soil seepage, analyzing how weird fiction by H.P. Lovecraft, the Strugatsky Brothers, and Jeff VanderMeer dramatizes nature’s revenge on human civilization. The final chapter focuses on deep sea horror—novels such as Rivers Solomon’s The Deep, Martin MacInnes’s In Ascension, and China Miéville’s The Scar—in which an alien Earth reveals itself in the oceans that cover our planet. In these chapters, the fantastic elements of fiction—representational practices that exceed the conventions of realism—suggest the possibility and urgency of imagining non-capitalist ways of inhabiting the Earth. Portions of the project have already appeared in venues including South Atlantic Quarterly, Public Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Textual Practice.