Professor Patrick Flanery

Research Interests

• Literary Fiction
• Creative Nonfiction
• Poetry
• Transnationalism and migration
• Surveillance and paranoia
• Queer theories, affects, and subjectivities
• Psychoanalysis and literature
• Lyric forms
• Film & Photography
• Contemporary North American Literature
• Contemporary European Literature in Translation

Recent and Ongoing Research

My four published novels are united by concerns with subjectivity, trauma, memory, migration, paranoia, and surveillance. A. S. Byatt has called me ‘a master of puzzling, alarming, and even terrifying storytelling.’

Absolution (2012) follows a South African expatriate who returns to Cape Town from the United States to write the biography of a celebrated novelist. Told in four voices, the book foregrounds the ethics of representation and the complex demands of recounting traumatic histories. The subject of a long review in the New Yorker magazine, the novel won the 2012 Spear’s Laurent Perrier Best First Book Prize and was shortlisted for others including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. In 2015 and 2016, Absolution was a set text on the IEB syllabus for South African secondary schools in the final English exam.

Fallen Land (2013), set in the American Midwest, is in conversation with traditions of American writing about the uncanny, the gothic, race, and suburbia. Set in the wake of the mortgage foreclosure crisis, it engages too with such issues as climate change, corporatism under neoliberalism, and debates about the posthuman. The New York Times reviewer, novelist David Vann, called it ‘an engaging attempt to identify the source of sourceless rage and the reasons an American dream, once achieved, can feel empty,’ and said it ‘speaks especially eloquently to our uncertain times’.

In I Am No One (2016), the narrator, a professor of modern German history who returns to New York after a decade at Oxford, becomes convinced he is under government surveillance, and is forced to reassess his relationship with an exiled Egyptian doctoral student. Novelist Teddy Wayne called it ‘a novel of Pynchonesque paranoid ideas, wrapped in psychologically acute Jamesian prose, delivered by a gripping story worthy of Graham Greene’, and the novelist Hanya Yanagihara said it confirmed me as ‘a writer with an uncanny sense of the anxieties and fears that define the modern condition’.

Night for Day (2019) is a formally experimental fiction that follows a group of characters working on a film noir in Hollywood on a single day in 1950 as their lives come to mirror the complicities and betrayals of the picture they are making (and whose screenplay is part of the text) in the shadow of the Red and Lavender scares of McCarthyite America. In the same year I published The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption, a hybrid critical-creative work of memoir and criticism that explores questions of belonging, queer identity, and kinship, engaging with the work of Melanie Klein, Eve Sedgwick, Sianne Ngai, and Lee Edelman, amongst others, and offering readings of contemporary fiction, visual art, television, and film—from Caché to Alien: Covenant.

In addition to my ongoing work as a scholar and critic (see my list of publications), I am currently working on a number of creative writing projects including fiction, poetry, and film.

I would be happy to hear from potential doctoral students whose interests and proposals overlap with any of my research areas.