I’m Steven Gotzler a cultural studies scholar and English professor living in Chapel Hill, NC.

Originally from California, I was born and raised in the high Mojave desert just east of the Sierra Nevadas near Death Valley. I attended undergraduate at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I earned a BA in American Studies with highest honors. After leaving Santa Cruz, I worked as a research assistant at the University of Pittsburgh, before going on to earn an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from Carnegie Mellon University in 2012. I then taught as an adjunct instructor at Robert Morris University and the Community College of Allegheny County, before pursuing my PhD at CMU where I achieved candidacy in 2016. I completed my PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies at CMU in 2021. In 2022, I joined the faculty of the Department of English & Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Teaching Assistant Professor.

My research explores the intersections of race, gender, environment and labor in literature and culture during the 20th century. I am particularly interested in modern British literature, the working-class novel, and postwar intellectual cultures. I have related interests in contemporary criticism that addresses the continued ir/relevance of intellectuals in public life today, and my digital humanities work emphasizes minimal computing principles that can help us re-appropriate the technologies that underwrite our labor as intellectual workers within the university. I also have a burgeoning interest in critical game studies, that consider the rhetorical affordances of games as cultural objects and as a medium for building cultural knowledge.

I currently serve as governing board member for the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), and am co-host of the podcast Subject Matter: Table Top. From 2015-2020 I was a founding member of the Contemporary Marxist Reading Group at CMU.

My research activities have been generously supported by the A.W. Mellon Foundation, The University of Victoria, the University of Southern California and Los Angeles Review of Books, and dSHARP.

My writing has been published in venues such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Find my full academic CV here.

For more information about what I’m currently writing please see the Writing page, and please see the Projects and Teaching pages for further details about my research and teaching activities.