Email Email brandon.pelcher@emerson.edu

J. Brandon Pelcher is Affiliated Faculty for Visual & Media Arts at Emerson College and Lecturer of German for International Literary & Cultural Studies at Tufts University. His research and teaching interests include the historical avant-garde, especially Dadaism, eco-critical thought particularly eco-feminist posthumanism and theories of environmental media, Marxist media theory, theories of the commodity and its consumption, and Black cultural history in Europe.

His first book, Dada's Subject & Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2023), reads Dadaist appropriation and redeployment of ostensibly "innocent" media (typography, photography, commodity forms/aesthetics) and genre (poetry, manifesto) as subversive performances of stable ideological subject formation.

His current book project, Commodity-Ecology: Environmental Matters in the Capitalocene, exposes the ideological organization that separates commodities from material "nature" and explores the human/consumer encounter with the environment as an experience with, through, and as a commodity. Viewing commodities as eco-media reveals the capitalist construction of a now post-human and post-nature apparatus that further facilitates consumption.

Research from these projects has been published in Bloomsbury, Gegenwartsliteratur, Modernism/Modernity, Monatshefte, Seminar, and Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature.

About

Areas of Expertise

  • Environmental Studies
  • Film
  • Humanities & Cultural Studies
  • Literature
  • Media Studies
  • Photography
  • Visual & Media Arts

Publications

Re-Emergent Wilderness and Waste: Matter in the Time of the Capitalocene

2024

Gegenwartsliteratur: Utopie – Dystopie – Zukünftigkeit (October 2024), 111-129

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111501888-008

Green Dada: Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Ecocritical Theory

2024

Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 60.3.1 (September 2024), 191-209

https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.60.3.1

Dada's Subject & Structure: Performing Ideology Poorly

2023

Palgrave-Macmillan, 12 July 2023

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26610-2 

Environmental Kitsch: Commodity-Ecology in Jenny Erpenbeck’s ‘Tand’

2022

Monatshefte 114.1 (Spring 2022), 103-123

https://doi.org/10.3368/m.114.1.103

Höch’s Weimar & Wilhelm: Rundschau’s Avant-Garde Re-Framing

2021

Performing Arousal: Precarious Bodies and Frames of Representation (2021), 89-101 
Bloomsbury series Methuen Drama Engage, eds. Julia Listengarten & Yana Meerzon

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350155664.0013 

Ideology with an /i/: Reading Dada with Kurt Schwitters

2020

Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 5.2 (19 November 2020)

https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0173

Being and the Madeleine: Forgetting in Heidegger, with Proust

2019

Comparatio: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, 11.2 (2019), 211-228

https://comp.winter-verlag.de/article/COMP/2019/2/5

“Window Shopping with Duchamp: Commodity Aesthetics Delayed in Glass”

2019

Studies in Twentieth & Twenty-First Century Literature, 43.2 (2019), Article 35

https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.2085