Nicole McCleese

Biography

Nicole McCleese is an Assistant Professor (fixed-term) in English at Michigan State University. Her teaching interests include feminist literary theory and Twentieth and Twenty-First Century American Literature. She describes her teaching philosophy as a pedagogy of rage. She is currently teaching an Integrated Arts & Humanities course, Human Values in the Arts & Humanities, where she situates rage in mediated narrative analysis of black, feminist, and queer disability stories, and considers how chronic medical narratives are shared on social media in comparison to literary genres, and other media, such as non-profit websites. A book chapter on Octavia Butler, “The Temporality of Huntington’s Disease and Chronic Medical Narratives” is forthcoming in an edited collection on science fiction and the medical humanities. Nicole is working on several projects on Kathy Acker, “A Feminist Re-Reading of Kathy Acker with My Students” will be included in an edited collection on teaching in the #MeToo era. She is also co-editing and contributing to an edited collection of essays on Acker. Additionally, her monograph, Masochistic Time: Narrative Delay, Historical Performance, and Sadomasochism in Contemporary Literature, considers formal masochism–via Deleuze–as the experience of waiting in feminist speculative fiction alternative histories, including Acker, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and Kazuo Ishiguro. Her article, “Queer Futures and the Anxiety of Anticipation: Literary Masochism in Delany” was published in African American Review.