Christopher Findeisen

Bio

Christopher Findeisen is completing his PhD at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His book on academic fiction is under contract at Johns Hopkins University Press. Early chapters of that project have appeared in PMLA and American Literature.

Contributions

“The Inconvenient Critics”: Institutional History and Political Economy

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In Mary McCarthy’s 1952 academic novel The Groves of Academe, the protagonist Henry Mulcahy is let go from Jocelyn College, a self-described sanctuary of academic freedom in a world haunted by the specter of Joseph McCarthy. The facts of the matter are undisputed: Mulcahy writes an article for Marxist Quarterly about dialectical materialism in James Joyce, donates money to the Henry Wallace campaign, attends a meeting given in support of dissenting political opinions, and then is informed by his employer that his contract with the college will not be renewed.