Jamison Kantor

Jamison Kantor focuses on Romanticism, the black diaspora, politics and materialism (both in the form of social rituals, like dueling, and physical agents, like viruses). His research considers how rich social categories represented in literature—racial difference, work and ecological stewardship—are depleted by modern technocracy, proceduralism and automation. His first book, Honor, Romanticism and the Hidden Value of Modernity (Cambridge 2022), argues that the Romantics disputed old hierarchies of honor through emerging representations of that value premised on equality. Engaging the philosophical and aesthetic innovations of slave narratives—as well as gothic mystery, the topographical poem and the financial novel—Honor… wrestles with an ongoing political problem, where abstract ideas of freedom overtake concrete forms of dignity. Kantor's book-in-progress considers technology, automation and the concept of historical progress from about 1750 to 1850. One chapter claims that Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man—about an apocalyptic pandemic—develops a new form of knowledge, “crisis thinking,” where all decisions are based on the proliferation of viral matter over space, not changes across time. Another chapter contends that the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley Peters challenges the repetition of neoclassical verse to assert the historical power of non-white subjects, labeled by colonists as mere automatons of language and, thus, incapable of history.

Kantor has also published in, among other journals, S.E.L., The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Jump Cut, and PMLA.