Charles M. Tung, PhD

Charles Tung CV (PDF)

Teaching and Research Interests

Welcome Statement: I began as a student of Romanticism and the lyric, but a number of factors, including acute hay fever, pushed me quickly into modernism. The focus of my doctoral work was early 20th-century British and American literature and time philosophy. I am also interested in race and atavism, models of history and identity in cultural and ethnic studies, and time-travel narratives. I have a real weakness for popular culture, especially bad Hollywood films and love songs.

Recent Courses
Modernism in Art and Literature; Modernism, Time Travel, and Alternate Histories; Asian American Literature; What Is “Ethnic” American Literature?;  Literary and Cultural Theory: History and the Deep Future


Recent Publications

• Modernism and Time Machines. Critical Studies in Modernist Culture series. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019
• “Clocks: Modernist Heterochrony and the Contemporary Big Clock.” In The Edinburgh Companion to Modernism and Technology, edited by Alex Goody and Ian Whittington, 36-50. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 2022
• “Out of Time and Going Sideways: John Wick, Time Traveler.”  In The Worlds of John Wick, edited by Stephen Watt and Caitlin Grace Watt, 265-289.  Bloomington:  Indiana University Press Studies in Fan Culture and Cultural Theory Series, 2022.
• “Posthistory Today: Historical Time and Virality after Flusser.”  In Understanding Flusser, Understanding Modernism, edited by Aaron Jaffe, Rodrigo Martini, and Michael F. Miller, 103-112.  New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2021.
• “Second Modernism and the Aesthetics of Temporal Scale.” In Modernism and the Anthropocene: Material Ecologies of Twentieth-Century Literature, edited by Jon Hegglund and John McIntyre, 133-150. Lanham: Lexington’s Ecocritical Theory and Practice series, 2021.
• “Time Machines and Timelapse Aesthetics in Anthropocenic Modernism.” In Timescales: Ecological Temporalities across Disciplines, edited by Bethany Wiggin, Patricia Kim, and Carolyn Fornoff, 79-94. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
• “The Angel of Alternate History and Apocalyptic Hope.” Apocalypse, special issue of ASAP/Journal, vol. 3, no. 3 (2018): 547-69.
• “Technology and Time:  Clocks, Time Machines, and Speculation.” In Time and Literature: Cambridge Critical Concepts, edited by Thomas Allen, 166-79. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• “Baddest Modernism: the Scales and Lines of Inhuman Time.” Modernist Inhumanisms, special issue of Modernism/Modernity, 23, no. 3 (2016): 515-38.

Education

BA, Georgetown University
MPhil, Oxford University
PhD, University of California, Berkeley