A scholar of contemporary fiction, media, and feminist science and technology studies, Arthur Z. Wang studies how scientific concepts travel across contexts and assert universal applicability. His current book project, Minor Theories of Everything, is an interdisciplinary inquiry into the proliferation of scientific universalisms about human sociality since the 20th century, and their surprising uptake by feminists and writers of color. His second book project, tentatively titled Making Scientific Lives, investigates the co-formation of biographical media and the modern sciences, tracing tensions between ideals of scientific impersonality and the vibrant circulation of scientists’ life stories in academic and popular cultures.
He received a Ph.D. in English from Yale University and before graduate school, worked as a software engineer. With Annie McClanahan, he co-edits Post45, a diamond open-access, peer-reviewed journal for scholarship on American literature and culture since the mid-twentieth century.,
Publications:
"The Game Theory of Sex," American Literature 94, no. 1 (2022): 103–131.
"Situation, Occasion, Encounter: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and Lyric Theory in the Historical Present," Contemporary Literature 60, no. 4 (2020): 515-548. Awarded the tenth L.S. Dembo Prize for best article published in Contemporary Literature in 2020.
Courses:
COMM 3011: Media, Medicine, and the Arts of Mortality