Research Description
Ramsey McGlazer writes about twentieth-century European and Latin American literature, film, and critical theory. He works in Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with research interests in poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, critical carceral studies, and feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory.
His first book, Old Schools: Modernism, Education, and the Critique of Progress (Fordham University Press, Lit Z Series, 2020), won the American Association for Italian Studies First Book Prize in 2021. The book identifies a critical, “counter-progressive” strain in the work of various cultural vanguards, from late Victorian Britain to 1970s Brazil. Reading poetry, fiction, and film alongside educational theory, Old Schools shows how figures ranging from Walter Pater and James Joyce to Pier Paolo Pasolini and Glauber Rocha all returned to and radically repurposed “the old school” that progressive educators wanted to leave behind.
He is working on a second book, provisionally titled Free Clinics: Aesthetics, Abolition, Antipsychiatry, that revisits mid-century critiques of psychiatry and the movements they inspired, especially in Italy and Brazil. Studying these movements in light of the ongoing struggle to abolish prisons, detention centers, and policing, the book argues that they were already responses to what we now call the carceral state. It also shows that they were crucially sustained and not merely supplemented by aesthetic practices, from Surrealist provocations to the “propositions” of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark. For radical clinicians receptive to these practices, a passage through the aesthetic dimension could make sensory reorganization possible and a refusal of the institution thinkable. Free Clinics explores the significance of their arguments and aesthetic engagements today.
McGlazer completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley in 2015. Before returning to Berkeley, he taught at the University of St Andrews and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women at Brown University. He is the Senior Editor of Critical Times and, with Lorenzo Fabbri, Coeditor of Italian Culture. He has also translated a broad range of essays and books, including Eduardo Grüner’s The Haitian Revolution: Capitalism, Slavery, and Counter-Modernity and, most recently, Rita Segato’s The War Against Women. His public writing has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, Parapraxis, and Post45 Contemporaries.