Jordan Brower

Education:
Ph.D., English and Film and Media Studies, Yale University (2016)

B.A., English, Amherst College (2007)
Biography:

I completed a joint PhD in English Literature and Film and Media Studies, and my recent research and writing attend to the various ways the institution of the Hollywood studio system inflected (primarily) American prose fiction in the first half of the twentieth century. I am beginning new work on contemporary Hollywood’s responses to crises of various scales (e.g. data breaches, executive malfeasance, technological shifts, climate change); portions of that project have appeared in JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. I'm also currently editing The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and Film. I have essays published in journals including Critical Inquiry, ELH: English Literary History, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, James Joyce Quarterly, Modern Language Quarterly, and Post45, and for a popular audience in the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Washington Post. 

I see classroom teaching as the foundation of my academic career. I'm especially invested in the ENG 280: Introduction to Film lecture, because I believe that whatever students' majors happens to be, they stand to gain a critical understanding of and appreciation for the media that populate their lives from this course. In 2025, I received the College of Arts and Sciences' Excellence in Teaching Large Courses Award for my efforts there. In 2024, I was honored as a "Great Teacher" by the University of Kentucky's Alumni Association. I'm very proud of this award; you can read more about it here: https://english.as.uky.edu/jordan-brower-receives-2024-uk-alumni-association-great-teacher-award

Before coming to the University of Kentucky in 2019, I taught as a lecturer in the interdisciplinary History and Literature program at Harvard University and, as a graduate student and then adjunct, at Yale University. 

 

Research Interests:
Classical Hollywood Cinema
Contemporary Hollywood Cinema
20th Century American Literature
Modernism
Film
Selected Publications:

Books

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism: A Literary History of the Studio System (Cambridge University Press, 2024)

American Literature in the World: A Web and Print Anthology, co-edited by Wai Chee Dimock, Jordan Brower, Edgar Garcia, Kyle Hutzler, and Nicholas Rinehart, Columbia University Press, 2017

 

Academic Articles

"A24's Academic Style; or, Coming of Age in an Era of Student Debt," JCMS: The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Spring 2025. 

"'I'm a Vampire': Nicolas Cage circa 2000," Post45: Contemporaries, December 14, 2021 

Jordan Brower and Scott Ganz, “One Finch, Two Finch, Red Finch, Blue Finch: Measuring Concentration and Diversity in the Humanities, a Response to Wellmon and Piper,” Critical Inquiry, July 24, 2017    

          • Editor’s Choice, Digital Humanities Now, July 27, 2017

“‘Written with the Movies in Mind’: Twentieth Century Literature and Transmedial Possibility,” Modern Language Quarterly 78.2 (June 2017)    

“The Mill on the Floss, Riparian Law, and the Difficulty of Judgment,” ELH 83.1 (Spring 2016)     https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612079

“An Immodest Proposal: The Politics of the Portmanteau in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly 51.2 (Winter 2014)  

Jordan Brower and Josh Glick, “The Art and Craft of the Screen: Louis Reeves Harrison and The Moving Picture World,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 33:4 (2013)     

 

Criticism and Public Writing

"The Put-On" (on Apple TV+'s Severance), Los Angeles Review of Books, June 30, 2025

Jordan Brower and Sarah Gleeson-White, "We Need to Talk about Camille," in Modernism/Modernity Visualities Forum. 

Palmer Rampell and Jordan Brower, "How Harold Bloom misunderstood the fall of the humanities," Washington Post, October 24, 2019 

“Hacking It: Blade Runner 2049,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 24, 2017 

“Will You Be as Gods?: On Silicon Valley,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 17, 2017 

“What We’ve Got Here: Arrival,” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 12, 2016 

          • Recommended by the New York Times in “Our Picks,” December 18, 2016

          • Most-read Film/Television/Music essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books, 2016

 

Reviews

Review of Michael Szalay, Second Lives: Black-Market Melodramas & the Reinvention of Television (University of Chicago Press, 2023), ALH Online Review, Series XLVI (June 2025).

Review of Jan Baetens, Novelization: From Film to Novel (The Ohio State University Press, 2018), Modern Language Quarterly 81.3 (September 2020) 

Review of Jonathan Foltz, The Novel After Film: Modernism and the Decline of Autonomy (Oxford University Press, 2018), Modernism/Modernity 26.1 (January 2019)    

Review of Joshua L. Miller, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Journal of American Studies 52.1 (February 2018)