Monika Kaup (she/her)

My research and teaching fields of interest have kept moving and shifting. Most recently, they have focused on 20^th/21^st-century literature, novel studies, and narrative theory. I am currently working on a monograph that focuses on vindicating narrative as a reliable mode of knowledge. Working at the intersection of cognitive science, hermeneutic phenomenology, novel studies and narrative theory, the book makes the case that to reaffirm narrative as reliable knowledge it is necessary to refocus what counts as knowledge, shifting emphasis from theoretical knowledge to practical reasoning. The argument proceeds through several case studies of modern and contemporary fiction. An article version of one chapter (“Tom McCarthy’s Neo-Neuro-Modernism: Reconfiguring Proustian Memory in Remainder”) is forthcoming in Contemporary Literature 66.2 (2026). 

Prior to that, my focus has been on the new realist movement in critical theory, apocalyptic fiction, the Baroque/Neobaroque/New World Baroque, Latino/a/x literature and culture, and hemispheric American and borderlands literature. My most recent book, New Ecological Realisms: Post-Apocalyptic Fiction and Contemporary Theory (Edinburgh UP, 2021) deals with revisioning realism in the eras of post-critique, of climate change and the end of postmodernism. Showcasing a new context-based concept of the real, it pairs critical theory with literature, proposing that post-apocalyptic fiction is an important source of new realist ontologies.

Before that, my research has explored the transhistorical and transnational continuities of the Baroque. Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature, Visual Art, and Film (Virginia UP, 2012) reflects on the rich, non-linear transhistorical and transcultural genealogy of baroque expression. Neobaroque in the Americas envisions the Baroque as an anti-proprietary expression that brings together seemingly disparate writers and artists—U.S. modernists, contemporary anti-dictatorship literature and film from Chile and Argentina, and U.S. Latino/a visual culture and art. 

I co-edited Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (with Lois Parkinson Zamora, Duke UP 2010), which traces the changing nature of baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its 17th-century origins as a Counter-Reformation and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and perceptual categories.

My journal articles can be found in Environmental Philosophy Online, Modernism/Modernity, Contemporary Literature, PMLA, Comparative Literature, and a special issue on globalism in Modern Language Quarterly.