Professor of English Dr. Christopher Breu will deliver the 2023 Fall College of Arts and Sciences lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, September 28, in Room 242, Schroeder Hall. A reception will follow the lecture in the Schroeder Art Gallery. His talk, “In Defense of Sex: Rethinking Embodiment and Desire in the Twenty-First Century,” is free and open to the public.
Breu teaches classes in 20th and 21st-century literature and culture, as well as cultural and critical theory. “The College Lecture was created as a way to share the wide variety of work being done across the College of Arts and Sciences,” said College of Arts and Sciences Dean Heather Dillaway. “I hope that everyone will consider joining us for what promises to be an interesting evening.”
Breu holds a doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz and joined the faculty at Illinois State University in 2000. In his time at Illinois State, he has earned awards for both his teaching and research skills. He was the recipient of a University Teaching Initiative Award in 2003 and the Outstanding College Teaching Award in 2012. In 2016, he won the Outstanding College Researcher Award.
He is the author of Insistence of the Material Literature in the Age of Biopolitics (2014) and Hard-Boiled Masculinities (2005) and is co-editor of Noir Affect (2020). He has also written or co-written more than 40 articles for numerous periodicals, including Cultural Critique, symplokē, Continental Thought and Theory, Modern Fiction Studies, Twentieth Century Literature, American Literary History, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts & Letters. His most recent manuscript, In Defense of Sex, will be published by Fordham University Press next year.
He has presented his work nationally and internationally. In 2011, he won a Fulbright Research Grant to work at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. That same year he completed a visiting professorship at Paderborn University in Paderborn, Germany. In 2022, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Catholic University in Eichstadt, Germany.
