Joseph L. V. Donica, Phd

Joseph Donica is professor of English at City University of New York's Bronx Community College. As a professor of American literature and a scholar of memory studies, he writes about literature and collective memory and how we use that memory to move us through collective crises such as Hurricane Katrina, economic disasters, and the climate emergency. He has written for Screenshot Magazine and reviews plays and performances for the site Thinking Theater NYC. Most recently, he gave talks at the LBGT Center on his co-edited collection and at The Umbrella Arts Center in Concord on “American Literature Before, During, and After the Climate Emergency,” which was sponsored by The Thoreau Society. And in summer 2024 he participated in CAORC’s Cambodia seminar studying the intersection of political and climate change in Southeast Asia.

Donica has recently co-edited a collection, Queer Then and Now (Feminist Press, 2023). He received The Carl Bode Award for his research on vice districts in nineteenth-century New Orleans and the Anne Rice Legacy award for his work on memory in Interview with the Vampire. He has served on the elections committee of the MLA and the executive boards of RMMLA and The Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is currently a Wertheim Research Fellow at the NYPL. He is writing a scholarly trilogy titled The Ends of Neoliberalism. Book one is titled Inequality's Memory: American Literature after the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. He is also completing a fantasy series titled The Secret History of Unicorns in the Bronx. And as a union activist, he devotes much of his work to returning the City University of New York to its founding vision as free for all NYC residents and reframing work in higher education as part of the global labor movement.

AREAS

American Literature including Post-1945, 19th-century, Arab-American, & Climate Fiction; Memory Studies, Collective & Cultural Memory, Memorials, Museums, Tourism, & Pilgrimage; Literature & Social Movements; Disaster Studies; Utopian Studies; Queer Studies; Horror, Gothic, & Vampire Studies; Histories of Digital Technologies & Their Futures; Higher Education History, Policy, & Future

Edited Collection

Queer Then and Now, edited and with an introduction by Debanuj DasGupta, Joseph L. V. Donica, and Margot Weiss, Feminist Press, 2023. 

Journal Articles

“Hawthorne’s Queer Utopian Failures in ‘The May-Pole of Merry Mount’ and ‘Earth’s Holocaust,’ Hawthorne Review, forthcoming.

“‘This is the same shit that happened in San Francisco’: Remembering, Forgetting, and Bullshitting History in the Many Iterations of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.” The Journal of Popular Culture, forthcoming.”

“Arab Utopian Futures: Science Fiction and Documentary Film in the MENA after the Arab Revolutions.” Science Fiction Film and TV, vol. 13, no. 3, 2020, 387-404.

“‘Addressing a virus, a war, or oneself’: Everyday Life in Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War.” College Literature, vol. 46, no. 2, 2019, pp. 424-52.

“#metoo, Gay Men, and American Literature’s Need for an Alternative Narrative.” Albeit, vol. 6, no. 1, 2018.

“Revising Vice: Tourism and America’s History of Vice in New Orleans’s Storyville.” The Journal of American Culture, vol. 41, no. 3, 2018, pp. 310-18.

“Not all Roads Lead to Rome: The State of Humanities at Community Colleges.” Rendezvous, vol. 41, no. 2, 2016, pp. 85-94.

“Negative Memory after Katrina: The Persistence of Memoir” Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 48, no. 2, 2016, pp. 41-70.

“‘They are Trying to Kill Us All’: The Ethics of Urban Space in Post-Disaster Graphic Narrative.” International Journal of Comic Art, vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 340-47.

Book chapters

“Radical Optimism at the End of the World: Teaching Queer Ecologies,” Palgrave, forthcoming.

“‘You got daddy’s attention now’: The Financialization of Social Bonds in Succession and Industry,” Neoliberalism and Affect in Twenty-First Century Culture, Bloomsbury, forthcoming.

“Prayer Groups and Porn Stars: My time in and out of the world’s most unusual university.” First Person Accounts from Evangelical Universities, edited by Lucas Wilson, U of Georgia P, forthcoming. 

“Neoliberal Utopia, Climate Fiction, and the Financialization of Everyday Life,” Figures of Freedom Twenty-First Century American Fiction, edited by Randy Laist, Fourth Horseman Press. Forthcoming. 

“Madness, Money, and Mullins: Ezra Pound's Rock-Drill Cantos, The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, and the American Conspiracy Tradition,” Lizards, Illuminati & Deepfakes: Conspiracy Theories at Play in Popular Culture, edited by Robert Spinelli, MacFarland. Forthcoming.

“New Orleans, Video-Game Tourism, and The Memory of Katrina.” Video-Game Tourism, edited by Daniel Olsen and Simon Hill, Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International. Forthcoming.

“The Veil in Public Art: Protest, Dialogue, and Alternative.” Between Vulnerability and Resilience: Representations of the Veil in Literature, Film, and Fine Arts, edited by Umme Al-wazedi and Afrin Zeenat. Syracuse UP, 2024, 181-203. https://press.syr.edu/supressbooks/6267/veil-obsessed/

“Arab Identity, Head Coverings, and The New Materialism.” All Things Arabia: Arabian Identity and Material Culture, edited by Ileana Baird, Brill, 2021, 163-178.

“Borough of the Dead: The Weight of Hip Hop’s History and Tourism’s Dark Pilgrimage in the Bronx.” Dark Tourism and Pilgrimage, edited by Daniel Olsen and Maximiliano Korstanje, Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International, 2019, pp. 205-15.

“Voodoo’s Circum-Atlantic Alternatives in George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes.” Conjure, Hoodoo, and Voodoo in African American Literature, edited by James Mellis, McFarland, 2017, pp. 50-68.

“The Bronx Isn’t Burning, Is it?: Ruin Porn and Contemporary Perceptions of The Bronx.” Ruin Porn: Essays on the Obsession with Decay, edited by Siobhan Lyons, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 45-80.

“The Erosion of the Cultural Commons and the Possibilities of Participatory Urbanism: Public Art in New Orleans, Detroit, and Port-au-Prince.” Urban Poetics: Sustainability and the City, edited by Lauren Curtright and Doris Brehm, Lexington, pp. 169-193. DATE 

“Streaming Culture, the Centrifugal Development of the Internet, and Our Precarious Digital Future.” The Age of Netflix: Critical Essays on Streaming Media, Digital Delivery, and Instant Access, edited by Myc Wiatrowski and Cory Barker, McFarland, 2016, pp. 55-73.

“Rethinking Utopia for the Twenty-First Century: The Good Life After Occupy and the Arab Spring.” The Good Life and the Greater Good in a Global Context, edited by Laura Savu-Walker, Lexington, 2015, pp. 87-104.

“Disaster's Ethics of Literature: Voicing Katrina's Stories against the Digital.” Ten Years after Katrina, edited by Mary Ruth Marotte and Glenn Jellenik, Lexington, 2014, pp. 3-16.

“From Ground Zero to Park 51: 9/11 in the Wake of Cosmopolitanism.” Recovering 9/11 in New York, edited by Robert Fanuzzi, Susan Rosenberg, and Michael Wolfe, Cambridge Scholars, 2013, pp. 150-167.

“Hierarchies of Knowledge and the Limits of Law and Theology in Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.” Edward P. Jones: New Essays, edited by Daniel Wood, Whetstone, 2011, pp.35-49.

Book and Theater Reviews & Interviews

“Federico García Lorca returns to New York: The Metropolitan Opera’s Ainadamar takes us back to fascist times and reminds us of our own ,” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture, forthcoming.

“Interview: Get Ready to Get Wounded: EPIC Players Theatre Brings Spring Awakening Back to the NYC Stage.” Thinking Theater NYC, 6 May, 2024, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2024/05/interview-get-ready-to-get-wounded-epic.html.

“Relapse is the Recovery Off-Broadway Needs.” Thinking Theater NYC, Sep. 18, 2023, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2023/09/review-relapse-is-recovery-off-broadway.html.

“‘What about Jesus? Better yet, what about love?’: The Unseen World Lets the Light in Through the Cracks with a Bang Up Performance. Thinking Theater NYC, Mar. 19, 2023, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2023/03/review-what-about-jesus-better-yet-what.html.

“God, We Need to Talk”: In "A Public Private Prayer," There Are No Answers to be Found. Just Peace. Thinking Theater NYC. 6 Mar., 2022, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2022/03/review-frigid-ny-festival-2022-god-we.html.

“Together We Can Live with the Sadness”: Clegg’s "The Lonely Road" Leaves You Lonely, But I Think That’s the Point. Thinking Theater NYC. 28 Feb., 2022, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2022/02/review-frigid-ny-festival-2022-together.html.

“That ‘Pony Feeling” gets Stampeded in “The Antelope Party.” Thinking Theater NYC. 11 Nov., 2021, https://www.thinkingtheaternyc.com/2021/11/review-that-pony-feeling-gets-stampeded.html.

Review of Making the Most of the Anthropocene, by Mark Denny. Ecozone@, vol. 10, no. 2, 2019, pp. 208-09.

Review of Reform or Repression, by Chad Pearson. Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 13, no. 2, 2019, pp. 190-92.

Review of American War by Omar El Akkad, St John’s Humanities Review, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019, pp. 44-46.

Review of How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis by N. Katherine Hayles, Digital Humanities Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 1, 2018, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/12/1/000369/000369.html.

Review of Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 32, no. 2, 2017, pp. 455-457.