Occupation University Professor | Years active 1994–present | |
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Education B.A., English; M.A., American Literature; M. Phil., Human Sciences; PhD, Human Sciences Employer Central Michigan University Known for Analyses of monsters, the Gothic, and cult media in American and popular culture Title Professor of English Language and Literature Alma maters University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University Books The Vampire Film: Und, Goth Music: From Sou, The Rocky Horror Picture S, Charles Brockden Brown, Vampire Film: Undead | ||
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (born January 24, 1970) is an American literature, film, and media scholar who has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University since 2001. He has authored or edited nineteen books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music. He is also an editor for the academic journal The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.
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Education
Weinstock graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English. He then earned an M.A. in American literature and both an M.Phil. and PhD from the Program in the Human Sciences at The George Washington University. He joined the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University in 2001.
Research
Weinstock's academic work has covered a variety of research areas, but clusters around theorizing the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires.
Monsters
Of particular interest to Weinstock have been the roles that monsters play in enforcing social norms while also highlighting desires to transgress those same norms. In an early article on freaks and freak shows, "Freaks in Space: ‘Extraterrestrialism’ and ‘Deep-Space Multiculturalism’," Weinstock adapts Edward Said's concept of Orientalism to address the ways in which contemporary racial stereotypes find expression in science fiction film and television through the role of the extraterrestrial.
In the introduction to the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, the 2014 encyclopedia he edited, he draws upon the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas to discuss monsters as violations of established cultural categories whose transgression of conceptual frameworks creates anxiety. This work won the 2014 Rue Morgue Magazine "Best 2014 Non-Fiction Book" award, as well as the 2014 "Golden Ghoul" award for "Best 2014 Non-Fiction Horror Book" from the Serbian Cult of the Ghoul publication.
In "Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture," his contribution to Asa Mittman and Peter Dendle's Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Weinstock proposes that twenty-first century Western culture has decoupled monstrosity from appearance creating concerns that monsters cannot be identified in advance of their attacks. To develop this argument, he focuses on serial killers, terrorists, faceless corporations, viruses, and natural phenomena such as global warming. In "American Monsters," a chapter included in Charles L. Crow's A Companion to the American Gothic, Weinstock addresses the cultural construction of American monsters paying attention to the roles of race and religion in creating monstrous others.
Ghosts
Weinstock's interest in ghosts and hauntings began with his doctoral dissertation, Dead Letters: Ghostly Inscriptions and Theoretical Hauntings, an analysis of the "spectrality of language" indebted to the post-structural theorizing of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and focusing around the idea of the "dead letter" in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Toni Morrison.
The dissertation became the springboard for two later book publications related to ghosts: 2004's Spectral America: Phantoms and the American Imagination and 2008's Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. In the introduction to Spectral America, Weinstock refers to the "spectral turn" of twenty-first century culture, a formulation that has resonated in later publications on ghosts and culture. In Scare Tactics, Weinstock argues for the existence of a little-acknowledged feminist tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writing ghost stories to contest various forms of legal and social oppression. Among the authors addressed in this study are Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, Alice Cary, Mary Austin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Harriet Prescott Spofford.
Vampires
Weinstock is perhaps best known for his 2012 work, The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema, which surveys the history of the vampire in film and addresses their persistent popularity in relation to the themes of sex, technology, and race. In the introduction to this book, indebted to the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Henry Jenkins III, he asserts seven principles governing the cinematic representation of vampires:
- The cinematic vampire is always about sex
- The vampire is always more interesting than those who pursue it
- The vampire always returns
- The cinematic vampire is an overdetermined body condensing what a culture considers ‘other’
- The cinematic vampire is always about technology
- The vampire film genre does not exist
- We are all vampire textual nomads
The Vampire: Undead Cinema was the winner of the 2013 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Lord Ruthven Assembly Award for Best Nonfiction Title.
Weinstock has focused on the popularity and importance of vampires in twentieth and twenty-first century culture in a number of articles and book chapters, including a chapter on American Vampires in the Edinburgh Companion to the American Gothic.
The Gothic
Weinstock's interests in monsters, ghosts, and vampires are specific manifestations of his broader interest in the American Gothic tradition—an interest that runs throughout his body of work and is reflected by his research on Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison, among others. Of note in this respect is his 2011 monograph on American Charles Brockden Brown arguing for the late eighteenth-century author's centrality in establishing American variants of four Gothic subgenres: the frontier Gothic, the urban Gothic, the psychological Gothic, and the female Gothic.
Cult Film and Television
Weinstock has also published research on cult film and television, including both a monograph and an edited collection on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, edited collections on directors Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, edited collections on Twin Peaks and the film The Blair Witch Project, and articles and essays on films including The Evil Dead and Bubba Ho-tep. Weinstock's 2007 book, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the first three titles published as part of the now well-established "Cultographies" series from Wallflower Press (now an imprint of Columbia University Press), offers a survey of the film's history, considers its sexual politics, examines its interweaving of references to other cinematic texts, and theorizes the audience's famous response as a vacillation between empathic and ironic behavior.
Popular Culture
Weinstock's research often seeks to theorize contemporary popular culture. Tangential to his emphasis on the Gothic, he edited a 2008 collection for SUNY Press on the animated program South Park.
Weird Fiction
Together with Carl Sederholm of Brigham Young University, Weinstock edited a 2016 scholarly collection on American author of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. Weinstock's own chapter contribution to the volume, "Lovecraft's Things," utilizes the insights of contemporary object-oriented ontology to consider the roles of material objects in Lovecraft's fiction. Weinstock had previously edited three volumes of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft for Barnes & Noble.
Pedagogy
Weinstock has expressed an interest through his career in pedagogy in general, and ways to teach the Gothic in particular. His 2003 edited collection, The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkin's Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-paper," addressed approaches to using Gilman's short story as a tool for teaching in the classroom. This collection became the subject of a round-table discussion in the Spring 2004 issue of the journal Pedagogy. In 2009, as part of the Modern Language Association's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series, Weinstock co-edited the volume Approaches to Teaching Poe's Prose and Poetry with Anthony Magistrale of the University of Vermont. His own contribution focuses on Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and charges of plagiarism surrounding it.
Music
An extension of Weinstock's interest in the Gothic, as well as a channeling of his interest in goth, industrial, and experimental electronic music, and his twenty years as a DJ of these genres, Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture is a study authored by Weinstock with musicologist Isabella van Elferen of Kingston University, London. Making use of the theories of Bruno Latour and M. M. Bakhtin, Van Elferen and Weinstock assert in this book that the diversity of styles encompassed by the generic rubric goth find their consistency through shared chronotopes—aural time-spaces that serve as the settings for shared fantasy narratives.