Featured Faculty
Daniel Worden
School of Individualized Study
Daniel Worden studies media forms, like comic books, dime novels, and documentary, that blur traditional categories governing the study of literature and art. In his award-winning book, Masculine Style: The American West and Literary Modernism, he documents how the “cowboy masculinity” that emerged in 19th-century dime novel Westerns informed the development of American modernism, in works by writers such as Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.
Daniel has also published three edited volumes that have allowed him to think more broadly about the eld of American cultural studies. These three books, The Comics of Joe Sacco, Oil Culture and Postmodern/Postwar–and After, strive to solidify current shifts in multiple fields. The Comics of Joe Sacco presents a multidisciplinary approach to the comics journalism of one of the most acclaimed and political comics artists of our time. Oil Culture collects and articulates the central aims of “Oil Studies” in the humanities, as an outgrowth of and departure from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Postmodern/Postwar–and After definitively accounts for changes that are underway in the eld of contemporary literary studies. All three projects share an interest in interrogating how art, literature, and culture relate to the material world. Oil Culture asks, for example, what cultural history would look like if it were periodized according to energy regimes: the age of coal, the age of American petroleum, the age of OPEC, the age of tar sands. Postmodern/Postwar–and After asks what contemporary literature looks like if we view postmodernism as just one aesthetic among many, rather than a catchall term for late 20th- and 21st-century literature. The Comics of Joe Sacco explores a major comics artist’s work, while also dwelling on how comics can represent historical events and serve as documentation of witness testimony and complex international con icts in our contemporary moment.
At RIT, Daniel coordinates the Comics Studies Lecture Series in SOIS, and is developing new courses on the history of comics, documentary art, and American culture.
Daniel Worden
Assistant Professor
RIT School of Individualized Study