The power of the work they did needs to be brought back into the contemporary conversation. And the cool thing is, like, I’m in a position to do that. And I think that otherwise you’re just a scenester.

Born: 1959.

Education: BA, interdisciplinary studies in English, philosophy, and comparative literature, 1986; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, MA, 1986;

Duke University, PhD, 1990.

Wolfe taught at Indiana University, Bloomington, University at Albany (SUNY), and is currently Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor, Department of English, Rice University. Wolfe also directs the Center of Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice, 3CT. Professor Wolfe has made fundamental interventions in animal studies and posthumanism. His most recent projects are Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens’ Birds (Chicago, forthcoming 2020) and a special issue of the journal Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, on “Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity” (forthcoming 2020), focused on the work of the multidisciplinary, multi-institutional Ontogenetics Process Group, of which he is a member. He is founding editor of the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press.

Publications

The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson (1993), Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the “Outside” (1998), Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and the Posthumanist Theory (2003), What Is Posthumanism? (2010), Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (2012), The Politics of Systems and Environments I and II, ed., special issues of Cultural Critique 30 and 31 (spring and fall 1995), Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity (2000) (rpt. of the above in a modified form with new introduction), Critical Ecologies, special issue of EBR: Electronic Book Review 4 (Winter 1997), ed. with Joseph Tabbi. http://www.altx.com/ebr. The MSN issue: Music/Sound/Noise, special issue of EBR: Electronic Book Review, ed. with Joseph Tabbi and Mark Amerika. http://www.altx.com/ebr, Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal (2003). The Other Emerson, ed. with Branka Arsic (2007).

Animal-studies scholar Jamie C. O’Reilly interviewed Cary Wolfe in Winter Park Colorado on August 10, 2019.

JCO: Professor Wolfe, what do you think were the big events in the history of theory, turning points, defining moments that have informed why and when you got into theory?