Joshua Gooch

Program: English Ph.D.
Began program in 2003
Area of Study: Deconstruction & 19th Century British Literature
E-Mail: joshua-gooch@uiowa.edu

I received my BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz in 2001 after a number of years kicking around various institutions, majors, and careers. The emphasis of the degree was "Modern Literature," a category precisely as vague as it sounds. In applying to UI, I chose an essay about Disraeli's Sybil, leading the department to interpellate me as a Victorianist, a decision I resisted as best I could before finally caving sometime during my fifth month in Iowa. I blame the winter, as "unseasonably mild" as the more inured claimed it to be. The turn was a sudden interest in the intersection of Hegelian dialectic and Victorian poetry, an avenue I am currently exploring.

Taking an almost perverse interest in a field I have yet to explore fully, I began serving as the Web Editor for the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies (IJCS) in 2003, before becoming Assistant Managing Editor of the journal in 2004.

Other untoward excitement: In the spring, I will present a paper on Todorov, Freud, and the Wolf-man accepted at a conference in Ghent entitled, "Rhetoric, Politics, Ethics."