Russ Castronovo - Why Does Security Make Us Feel Unsafe?
In a world burdened with a staggering security apparatus (surveillance cameras, access codes, facial recognition, and so much more), constructed in an effort to allow us to remain free, lies a great paradox: it actually makes us feel less safe.
Russ Castronovo Biography
Russ Castronovo, PhD, is the Director of the Center for the Humanities and Hilldale Professor of the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He is an and editor of 11 books, writing broadly about literature, aesthetics, and political theory. A leading figure in the fields of American literature and American Studies, he has written about print culture, novels, poetry, film, and other media forms across four centuries from the 18th through the 21st century, publishing with distinguished university presses and top-flight peer-reviewed journals across multiple disciplines.
His book, American Insecurity and the Origins of Vulnerability (2023), has been the subject of podcasts, seminars and colloquies, and public presentations at book festivals. Other monographs include Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (2014); Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and the Anarchy of Global Culture (2007); Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century-United States (2001); Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995). Castronovo is much sought after as a keynote and plenary speaker, having delivered nearly 100 invited lectures in universities and colleges in the United States and in Germany, Italy, Sweden, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Britain, and Canada. His idea of “printscapes,” his revaluation of propaganda, his concept of “necro citizenship,” his critique of security culture, and other scholarly interventions have influenced and shaped conversations in literary studies and other humanities fields. He has served on multiple editorial boards, and in 2023 he was named the co-editor of American Literary History, the top journal in American literary studies. His next book (co-authored with Anna Brickhouse) is simply titled Vulnerability and is forthcoming from the Literature and Politics series published by Oxford University Press.
Castronovo also writes regularly for public audiences in newspapers such as the Wisconsin State Journal, the Denver Sun, and the Seattle Times, in online media sites such as Public Seminar and Public Books, and in higher education forums such as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education. This outreach is matched by the work he does in the classroom, which was recognized with the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2016) and the Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award (2017), a University of Wisconsin System-wide award given to only four recipients each year from among twenty-six campuses in the system. He is especially gratified that he has been able to use his experience in publishing, editing, and research to promote the work of more than a dozen colleagues and graduate students at UW-Madison by either co-authoring or including their work in both scholarly and public venues.
