James Zeigler

I joined OU English in 2007, and I am a faculty member in both Literary & Cultural Studies (LCS) and Rhetoric & Writing Studies (RWS). I am also affiliated with OU’s program in Environmental Studies. 

At the graduate level, I offer seminars on Forms of Protest, Cold War Sexualities & Queer Theory, and the required LCS course in Literary Criticism (i.e. the theory & methods intro.) 

My undergraduate courses include the introductory courses for new majors (2273 & 2283), American literature surveys (2773 & 2883), Anthropocene Stories (on writing about climate change), and The Graphic Novel (3403). The course on the graphic novel fulfills the University’s General Education requirement for Artistic Forms. At the 4000-level, I teach courses on Big, Ambitious Novels by Twenty-First Century Women (4273) and James Baldwin: Literature & the Long Civil Rights Movement (4013).

After serving as the sole Editor for the academic journal Genre for seven years, in 2022 I became Coeditor working in partnership with Professor Justin Sider. Founded in 1968, Genre is published for OU English by Duke University Press. The journal sponsors a Graduate Research Assistant (GRA)/Assistant Editor position for an OU English graduate student one semester each academic year. In 2021, Assistant Editor and PhD candidate Courtney Jacobs and I co-edited two special issues of Genre on the same topic as my course on big, ambitious novels. My essay introducing Part 1, “Big Novel Ambition without Apology,” is accessible for free courtesy of Duke UP.

I am currently writing a monograph about big, ambitious graphic novels. With a working title of “Doorstop Comics: Knowing Graphic Novels,” the project investigates how long-form comic books published over the last 30 or so years have renovated the traditional genre of the historical novel in order to identify, critique, and correct the institutionalization of ignorance. An excerpt from this work-in-progress, “A Secret History of Miscegenation: Jimmy Corrigan and the Columbian Exposition of 1893,” was published as a chapter in the Eisner Award-winning anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers UP). 

My first book, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism, was published in the Race, Rhetoric, and Media Series from the University Press of Mississippi. My favorite review is Mary Helen Washington’s for American Literature. A chapter related to the book, “Black is Red All Over Again,” is an example of how I use a cultural rhetoric studies approach to demonstrate that the discourse of anticommunism in the United States has been and remains a resource for anti-Black racism.

I frequently advise “senior thesis” projects for students in the Honors College. With a couple exceptions, the following projects were all based on work students began in one of my courses:

Fight Club & Toxic Masculinity w/Ian Turpin, spring 2022
Law, Lit, and Reproductive Rights w/Julia Turner, spring 2021
Feminist Dystopia and Reproductive Rights w/Sydney Stutler, spring 2021
Box Novels and Literary Experimentalism w/Alex Crayon, spring 2020
Late Baldwin w/Cade Bross, spring 2020
Transnational Novels In & Out of America w/Anna Baumann, fall 2018
Feminism and Class in Comic Autographies w/Allison Weintraub, fall 2017
Scandal: Modernism’s Female Body w/Hannah Grace Lanneau, spring 2017
Anthropocene and the New Materialisms w/Tyler Tennant, spring 2015
Postmodern Autobiography and Judith Butler w/Emilye Lewin, spring 2015
Critical University Studies w/Sarah Conard, spring 2013
Moral Philosophy and the Question of the Elephant w/Becca Skupin, spring 2012 
Neoliberalism and Left Critique w/Lauren Brentnell, fall 2011
Comic Books and the Critique of Corporate Personhood w/Jeff Clark, spring 2011
Race and Realism in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson w/Evin Groundwater, fall 2010
Historical Metafiction w/Andrew Shipley, spring 2010
Cold War Literature and Law w/Natasha Chaudry, spring 2010
Rhetorics of the New Left w/Chase Bollig, fall 2008

Twentieth-century American literature; literary theory; rhetoric.