Skip to main content
Skip to main content

Orrin Wang

Faculty Profile photo

Professor of English and Comparative Literature, English
Affiliate Professor, American Studies

(301) 405-3754

3240 Tawes Hall
Get Directions

Research Expertise

Comparative Literature
Film Studies and Cultural Studies
Literary Theory
Romantic

Orrin Wang specializes in the study of both Romanticism and theory and is especially interested in how the two discourses converge. How that convergence speaks to the question of modernity is the focus of his first book, Fantastic Modernity: Dialectical Readings in Romanticism and Theory (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996). How that convergence is further expressed in Romantic and post-Romantic narratives of sensation and sobriety is the subject of his Romantic Sobriety: Sensation, Revolution, Commodification, History (Johns Hopkins UP, 2011), the winner of the 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize. Wang has written on such figures as P.B. Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, Wollstonecraft, Dacre, Kant, Derrida, and Zizek and also teaches and studies the gothic. His latest book, Techno-Magism: Media, Mediation and the Cut (2022) is part of Fordham UP's Lit Z series and is about Romanticism and media studies, and was shortlisted for that year’s Marilyn Gaull Prize.  He is also the editor of Frankenstein in Theory (Bloomsbury, 2021), the General Editor of Romantic Circles, and was the recipient of the Keats Shelley Association of America's Distinguished Scholar Award for 2021. He is currently writing about the connection of fantasy and the death drive in Keats, Tennyson, and N.K. Jemisin.

Read Orrin Wang's In Memoriam: Professor Marshall Grossman.