[ tyler curtain ]
Associate Professor of English and
Cultural Studies, Fellow of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, UNC Chapel Hill, Associate Fellow of the Gender Institute in the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science, and Senior Scholar at the Humanities Institute in the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdisciplinary and International Studies, Duke University

Spring 2005 Courses

• Imagining Extinctions (Honors, Undergraduate Course)
• Horror (ENGL 47, Undergraduate Seminar)

Tyler Curtain recently finished his first book, Mistaken Evolution: computers, the post-human, and other anxious objects of biological and cultural reproduction (Duke UP, forthcoming).

The work is a sustained engagement with four key topics central to any given account of the post-human: subjectivity and theories of evolution/evolutionary time; the relations between the reproduction of machines and culture; critical theoretical and cultural studies understanding of “discourse” and concomitant anxieties about language death and species extinction; and the conflation of biological and cultural reproduction. Each of the four chapters focuses on one issue. Curtain organizes the discussion around two important theorists of society, machines, and culture, Alan Turing and Norbert Wiener, and various literary, scientific, and cultural texts.

Strikingly, Dr. Curtain's theoretical and archival work exists in the interstices of queer theory, radical philosophies of biology and evolution, and work that he has done previously on the cultural studies of the computer sciences -- what brings those things together are each of those fields' understanding of "representation." Mistaken Evolution relocates evolutionary theory in a queer context, as well as position queer theory in present-day debates about evolution/philosophy of biology. Such a relocation allows for and contributes to a materialist/historicist account of sexuality, human embodiment, and cultural reproduction. Curtain draws on the body of literature that has attempted to delineate the contours of the "post-human.”

For the Spring semester of 2005 , Dr. Curtain is teaching an honors course entitled "Imagining Extinctions," and starting work on a book manuscript by the same name. He is teaching a second course on horror fiction. Professor Curtain is a Fellow at The Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a 2002-3 recipient of the Spray-Randleigh Fellowship in the Humanities. In June 2004 he spoke at King's College London at the queer and critical theory conference Queer Matters.

In August of 2004 he presented a paper on the subject of language death at a two week symposium at the Wissenshaftkolleg zu Berlin. This essay will be part of a volume of work produced by the group under the auspices of the National Humanities Center that address the question of language in the humanities.

Tyler Curtain is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and sits on the governing board of the University Program in Cultural Studies at UNC Chapel Hill. He has served as director of the SITES - New Media/Theory Lab. Curtain is on the directing committee for the Program in Sexuality Studies at UNC. He also sits on dissertation committees at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Related Sites

A short biographical sketch.

You can find out more information about Professor Curtain's theoretical and scholastic publications at the Queer Theory website.

University Program in Cultural Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Tyler Curtain's Homepage