Contact Information
Biography
Areas of Specialization
Late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States literature and culture.
Activities and Interests
My teaching and research explore intersections of gender, sexuality and race across cultural forms and social formations. Undergraduate and graduate courses on Cultural Studies, Theories of the Novel, Contemporary Literature, and Gender and Sexuality ask how novels, experimental prose, and visual media shape broader social and political conditions across North America and its transnational contexts. Related research has resulted in articles and books about popular culture and politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century United States, with a specific focus on how dynamics of age, power and sexuality have played a key if under-examined role in the dominant cultural logics of this period. My first book Everybody’s Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (University of Minnesota Press, 2009) explores how a 1990s “boom” in novels and popular media about father-daughter incest contributed to broader transformations of family life associated with neoliberal governance. My second book Virtual Pedophilia: Profiling Sex Offenders and U.S. Security Culture (Duke University Press, 2020) explores how the roughly contemporaneous emergence of the “pedophile” in film, television, and digital texts linked techniques of information science and visual surveillance across forensic and filmic domains to couple neoliberal governance with security culture.
Additional research and teaching focus on education justice and carceral abolition. I worked with three higher education in prison programs in the Puget Sound Area from 2009 - 2020: the University Beyond Bars (UBB) offering courses inside the Washington State Reformatory (WSR) from 2009 [http://universitybeyondbars.org/]; the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound (FEPPS) offering courses inside the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW) since 2011 [http://fepps.org/]; and the Black Prisoners Caucus T.E.A.C.H. (BPC-TEACH) program offering courses inside the Clallam Bay Correctional Center (CBCC) since 2012 [http://www.blackprisonerscaucus.org/currentprogramsofbpc/t-e-a-c-h]. Since the closure of WSR in 2021, UBB has transitioned to RECLAIM [https://www.reclaimwa.org/]. From 2019-2020, I also worked with the gender and sexuality affinity groups Alliances at WSR and Unity at Twin Rivers Unit (TRU). If you are interested in these or related organizing efforts, please feel free to reach out.
Research
Selected Research
- Review of Cait McKinney, Information Activism: A Queer History of Lesbian Media Technologies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020) for American Literary History Online Review Series XXVII (2022).
- Review of Myka Tucker-Abramson, Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019) for Modern Philology 117.3 (February 2020): 207-209.
- Gillian Harkins, Virtual Pedophilia: Sex Offender Profiling and U.S. Security Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).
- Gillian Harkins, “Adolescent Agencies in the Age of Consent,” Review of Joseph J. Fischel, Sex and Harm in the Age of Consent(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016) for GLQ: Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (2017): 378-381.
- Gillian Harkins, “Beyond Access: College Programs in Prison and Transforming Education,” Special Issue “Incorporation and Excess,” Eds. Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse, S&F: Scholar and Feminist Online 13.2 (Spring 2016): http://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/
- Gillian Harkins, “Lost Sociality of Skin: Security and the Pedophilic Function,” Special Issue “Cultures of Security,” American Literary History 28.4 (Winter 2016): 740-758.
- Gillian Harkins and Erica R. Meiners, “Teaching Publics in the American Penalscape,” American Quarterly 68.2 (June 2016): 405-408.
- Gillian Harkins, “Protest Midcentury Style,” Review of Tyler T. Schmidt, Desegregating Desire: Race and Sexuality in Cold War American Literature (Delaware, 2013); Tracy Floreani, Fifties Ethnicities: The Ethnic Novel and Mass Culture at Midcentury (SUNY, 2013); Joseph Keith, Unbecoming Americans: Writing Race and Nation from the Shadows of Citizenship, 1945-1960 (Rutgers, 2013) for American Literary History 27.2 (Summer 2015): 363-373.
- Review of Brian Connolly, Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) for Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Review, Rutgers Law School (May 2015): http://clcjbooks.rutgers.edu/books/domestic-intimacies.html.
- Gillian Harkins and Erica Meiners, “Interview: Policy, Prison and the Abolition Undercommons,” Policy People Reader, Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands (March 2015): http://policy-people.com/.
- Gillian Harkins, “Sisters at the Gate: Mean Girls and Other Sibling Phenomena,” Juliet Mitchell: Reflections, Eds. Robbie Duschinsky and Susan Walker (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2015): 229-254.
- Gillian Harkins, Mary Gould, and Kyes Stevens, “College Civic Engagement and Education Behind Bars: Connecting Communities, Creating Change,” Special Issue: “Bringing College Education into Prisons ” New Directions for Community Colleges, Eds. Rob Scott and Susan Walker (Wiley Periodicals, Inc, 2015): 101-109.
- Gillian Harkins, “Incest,” Globalization and Sexuality section of four volume Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, general editors Patricia Whelehan and Anne Bolin (forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell 2015).
- Gillian Harkins and Erica Meiners, “Beyond Crisis: College in Prison through the Abolition Undercommons,” “Theory” section of Lateral: Cultural Studies Association Journal (Spring 2014): online.
- Gillian Harkins, Review of Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012) in Feminist Theory 2014.
- Gillian Harkins and Jane Elliot, “Genres of Neoliberalism,” Special Issue of Social Text 31.2 115 (Summer 2013).
- Gillian Harkins, “Virtual Predators: Neoliberal Loss and Human Futures in Mystic River ” Social Text 31.2 115 (Summer 2013): 123-143.
- Gillian Harkins, “Access or Justice? Inside-Out and Transformative Education,” Turning Teaching Inside Out: A Pedagogy of Transformation for Community-Based Education , Eds. Simone Davis and Barbara Roswell (Palgrave, December 2013): 187-196.
- Gillian Harkins, “Sex Offenses and the Imaginaries of Punitive Reason,” Review of Roger N. Lancaster, Sex Panic and the Punitive State (Berkeley: University of California Press 2011) and James B. Waldram, Hound Pound Narrative: Sexual Offender Habilitation and the Anthropology of Therapeutic Intervention (Berkeley: University of California Press 2012) in Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36.2 (November 2013): 410-414.
- Gillian Harkins and Kate Drabinski, “Teaching Inside Carceral Institutions,” Special Issue of Radical Teacher 95 (Winter 2012).
- Gillian Harkins, “Foucault, the Family and the Cold Monster of Neoliberalism,” Foucault, the Family and Politics , Eds. Leon Rocha and Robbie Duschinsky (London: Palgrave McMillan, 2012): 82-120.
- Gillian Harkins, “Aye, and Neoliberalism,” Special Issue: Sexualities and Genders in the Age of Neoliberalism, Journal of Homosexuality 59:7 (Summer 2012): 1073-1080.
- Gillian Harkins, Review of Roger Porter, Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011) in Prose Studies 34.3 (2012): 258-261.
- Gillian Harkins, “Documenting the Pedophile: Virtual White Men in the Era of Recovered Memory” New Formations 70 (2010): 23-40.
- Gillian Harkins, Everybody's Family Romance: Reading Incest in Neoliberal America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
- Gillian Harkins, “Surviving the Family Romance? Southern Realism and the Labor of Incest in Bastard Out of Carolina” The Southern Literary Journal (Fall 2007): 114-139; Reprinted in Realism’s Others , Eds. Eva Aldea and Geoff Baker (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010): 247-277.
- Gillian Harkins, “Seduction by Law: Sexual Property and Testimonial Possession in Thereafter Johnnie” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture , Special Issue on Testimony, 25.1-2 (Winter 2003): 138-165.
- Gillian Harkins, “Telling Fact from Fiction: Dorothy Allison's Disciplinary Stories” Incest and the Literary Imagination, Ed., Elizabeth Barnes (Gainesville: Florida University Press, 2002): 283-315.
Research Advised
- Pinnata, Reuven. Totalizing Nusantara: On World Literature as Indonesian Literature. 2024. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Schaumberg, Ned. Waterlogged: Narrating Hydroecologies in the Anthropocene. 2018. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Baros, R. Allen. Queering La Familia: Charting Chican@ Consciousness in Cultural Politics. 2017. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Shajirat, Anna. The Gothic Fantasy of History: Fear and Loss in the British Long Eighteenth Century. 2017. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Escalera, Gibran. 1848 Beyond the 19th Century: Border Fictions, Peripheral Modernities. 2015. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
- Ariel Basom. Queer Manhattan: Truman Capote's Strange New York. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Tanya Joy Friedland. Harry Potter and the Violence of Censorship. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Nicole Megan Beckwith. Finding the Sunshine in Sitcom. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Salwa Tabassum Hoque. Bodies Stripped. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Hilary Roseann Bowen. Crossing the Frame Between Art and Audience through Movement: Themes of Representation in The Cost of Living. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Matthew Michael Jackson. The Traumatic Utopia. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Max Stuart Carsen. V-Processes in Gravity's Rainbow. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Vedran Jankovic. Bow Down: The Evil of Banality and the Phantasmal Subject of Nightwood. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Eric Ga-Ming Cheuk. What has cast such a shadow on you?: Monstrosity, Interpretive Excess, and the Politics of Representation in Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" and Melville's "Benito Cereno.". Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Hyungbin Lae Kang. The Image and Motif Across Conversation in Nightwood. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Heekwon Choi. Formations of Resistance in Korean American Fiction. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Dominique E. Naylor. Uncovering Adventure: Disguise and the Masking of Power in the Sherlock Holmes Stories. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Ian Russell Cunningham. The War Will Be Televised: Racial Profiling and the War on Drugs in Breaking Bad. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Emelia Hope Nitz-Ritter. Common Core, Common Tongue? An analysis of the treatment of language in the Common Core State Standards. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Jordan Taylor Augustine. Look What Thy Memory Cannot Contain: Some Notes on William Gibson's Agrippa (A Book of the Dead) and the Poetics of Mnemonic Technologies. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Enrico Jarod Doan. From Americana to the Borderlands Consciousness: The Evolution of Violence from the Frontier to the Geo-Political Border between the United States and Mexico. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.
- Brandon Lee Oppenheim. World Building and Foundation Shifting: Queer World Creation through the Transgressive and Obscene Literatures of Story of the Eye and Nightwood. Honors Thesis, University of Washington. 2014.