Erin Greer is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of Texas at Dallas, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Victorian, modernist, and contemporary British literature, critical theory, and political philosophy. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.St. in English from the University of Oxford, and a B.A. from Duke University. This site collects her writing for both general and academic audiences about literature, politics, intimate and political conversation, digital social media, and more.
Essays
"Something That Would Have Been Somebody," Salmagundi, 2020. Integrates personal narrative, histories of reproductive justice & injustice, and political philosophy to reflect on abortion and political polarization.
* listed as notable in Best American Essays 2021.
"Virginia Woolf and the Art and Politics of Conversation," IU Press blog, 2017. Accompanies an academic article (linked below), connecting the article's analysis of Woolf's The Waves to the breakdown of "common sense" in contemporary US politics.
"Tolstoy and Tahrir," The Normal School, 2012. Considers what Tolstoy might say about attempts to narrate the historical upheavals in the "Arab Spring."
Academic Articles
"Must We Do What We Say? The Plight of Marriage and Conversation in George Meredith's The Egoist," Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding, ed. Garry L. Hagberg (Palgrave, 2018). Reads The Egoist in dialogue with JL Austin and Stanley Cavell to study the intersection between speech performativity, social inequality, and the possibility of ethical acknowledgment in conversation.
"'A Many-Sided Substance': The Philosophy of Conversation in Woolf, Russell, and Kant." Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 3 (2017): 1-17. Argues that Woolf's experimental "playpoem," The Waves, proposes an aesthetically charged mode of conversation as a worldmaking response to philosophical skepticism, which raises doubts about our capacity to perceive and share the same reality.
About & Contact
Erin is currently writing a book that draws together literature and philosophy to investigate the (imagined and real) function of conversation in collective life. It interweaves readings of British novels, ordinary langauge philosophy, aesthetic theory, and political philosophy to elaborate how speaking and perceiving together generate a shared sense of reality. Among other things, the book proposes a literary-philosophical alternative to prevailing conceptions of "post-truth" politics.
You can view her cv here, and reach her via email at erin.greer[at]utdallas.edu.
