Born: 1963.

Education: Marquette University, BA, 1981–85; Loyola University, Chicago,

MA and PhD, 1986–91.

Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and philosophy at Penn State University. His books over the last decade constitute a kind of trilogy on biopower and its discontents in the neoliberal present: Foucault Beyond Foucault (2008), Post-Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012), and Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016).

Publications

Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993, 1996), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), The Theory Toolbox: Critical Concepts for the Humanities, Rethinking the Frankfurt School, co-ed. (2002), Arts & Social Sciences (with Susan Searls Giroux, 2003), Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (2007), Post-Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012), Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (2016), I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism and American Popular Music (2018), Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism (2021), and https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=jeffrey+nealon&view=detail&mid =5171E9B5FAC55AFBEA915171E9B5FAC55AFBEA91&FORM=VIREj (a three-part video of talk on post-postmodernism).

His important articles include “A Random Walk Down Las Vegas Boulevard: Empire of the Intensities,” Parallax (2002); “Disastrous Aesthetics: Irony, Etihics, and Gender in Barthelme's Snow White,” Twentieth-Century Literature (2005); “Take Me Out to the Slot Machines: Reflections on Gambling and American Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2006); “The Swerve around P: Literary Theory after Interpretation,” Postmodern Culture (2007); “The Economics of Academic Freedom; or, Plato's P&T Committee,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2009); “RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith's The Weather,” Critical Inquiry (2013); “Still life, with Tequila,” Oxford Literary Review (2014); “Stuart Hall and the ‘Detour through Theory’ Revisited,” South Atlantic Quarterly (2016); “Living and Dying with Foucault and Derrida: The Question of Biopower,” Between Foucault and Derrida (2016); “The Frankfurt School and Its Successors,” Blackwell Companion to Literary Theory (2017); “Jokes and the Performative in Austin and Derrida; or, The Truth Is a Joke?” Cultural Critique (2017); “Postmodernism,” Bloomsbury Companion to Literary and Cultural Theory (2019); “Anti-Theory 2.0,” What's Wrong with Antitheory? (2019); “Steamy,” symplokē (2020).