Dr Aaron Nyerges

Aaron Nyerges is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the US Studies Centre. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney and a BA in Creative Writing from the State University of New York. His work focuses on the relationship between literature, media and geography. His research appears in Textual Practice, Sound Studies, The Australasian Journal of American Studies, and The Journal of Popular Culture, as well as in numerous edited collections. 

Two separate grants — from the Perth USAsia Centre in 2014 and the Sydney Social Science and Humanities Research Centre in 2015 — supported the editing of two, related special issues. The first, on comparative regionalism, was published by the Stanford University journal Occassion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities in 2016. The second, on regionalizing American Studies, appeared in The Australasian Journal of American Studies in 2017. 

His first book examines the role of media technology and modernist aesthetics in producing a sense of US national geography. It describes the affective and technological means by which Caribbean and Pacific territories (sometimes called the 'insular possessions' of the United States) were foreclosed from national belonging. 

Aaron researches and writes more broadly on US popular culture; critical theory; film studies, media and technology; literature, sexuality, race and gender; as well as US cultural interactions with Mexico, the Caribbean and the Pacific. 

Publications

“Burroughs in Mexico; Burroughs in Women’s Studies” in Cutting Up the Century: A William Burroughs Anthology. Eds. Joan Hawkins and Alex Wermer-Colman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. [Forthcoming]

“Phony City: Under the Skin of Authenticity” in Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Authenticity and Exceptionalism. Eds. Matt Sasakeeny and Thomas J. Adams. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. [Forthcoming]

“Regionalizing American Studies: Within and Beyond the Nation” [With Thomas Adams]. Eds. Aaron Nyerges and Thomas J. Adams, “Regionalizing American Studies,” Australasian Journal of American Studies 36, no.2 (2017): 3-11.

“Wilder than Adorno: Billy Wilder, State Capitalism, and Hollywood after Buchenwald,” Journal of Popular Culture 50, no. 4 (2017): 604-521.

“Styling Sovereignty: Gertrude Stein’s epideictic constitution of the USA,” Textual Practice 31, no. 1 (2017). 59-79. 

“Hearing Hart Crane: In the shape of New York’s noise” Sound Studies 2, no. 2 (2016). 107-188. 

"The Transmigration of West: Toward a Comparative Critical Regionalism” [With Golnar Nabizadeh]. Eds. Aaron Nyerges and Golnar Nabizadeh. "Pop West." Occassion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 10 (2016).

"Populism and Propaganda in US Culture Industries" [with Rodney Taveira]. Eds. Rodney Taveira and Aaron Nyerges. "The State and US Culture Industries." Special Issue. Australasian Journal of American Studies 35, no. 1 (2016).

“Orienting the Coppolas: A New Approach to U.S. Film Imperialism,” Sydney Studies in English 40 (2014). 1-20.

“Immemorial Cinema: film, travel and Faulkner's poetics of space” in Faulkner and Film. Eds. Peter Lurie and Ann Abadie. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2014.

“The Digital Pacific: Jack Spicer, Michael Dransfield and the poetics of addictation.” Scenes of Reading: Australian Literature and the World Republic of Letters. Eds. Robert Dixon and Brigid Rooney. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2013.