Dr Harriet Stilley
Postdoctoral Fellow, September - November 2019
Project: Contesting Gender and Genre: Masculinity in Contemporary Asian American Crime Fiction, 1981-2011
My research focuses on masculinity in modern and contemporary American fiction. My PhD, completed at the University of Edinburgh in 2017 and published by Routledge in 2018, explored the development of masculinities in the American 1970s, and the post-sixties, post-Vietnam, and ultimately post-Fordist shocks that the United States experienced during that decade.
I am currently working on my second monograph, which will deliver an innovative examination of masculinity in contemporary Asian American crime fiction. The aim of this project is to challenge the constitution of ‘Asian American’ literary discourse through a critical engagement with the hard-boiled detective genre. By way of in-depth literary analysis, historical investigation, and sociological critique, my project will examine heretofore uncharted territory for the study of both Asian American literature and detective novels in order to disrupt the invidiously white, male, heterosexual bias of the crime novel and allow for an alternative understanding of both Asian American ‘male’ subjectivity and the crime genre in the late twentieth century.