Dr Jo Freer

Dr Jo Freer is Senior Lecturer in American and Postcolonial Literature in the Department of English and Creative Writing. She is the author of several works on the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, including the monograph Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (Cambridge UP, 2014), and is (co-)editor of essay collections including The New Pynchon Studies: Twenty-First Century Critical Revisions (Cambridge UP, 2019) and Thomas Pynchon, Gender, and Sex (Georgia UP, 2018).

Her research is motivated by a fascination with counter-communities and the role of literature in promoting, critiquing and helping to form them. Her early research centered on representations of the 1960s/70s American counterculture across Thomas Pynchon's fictional universe; this focus has since expanded to include ‘post-countercultural’ responses and anarchist politics in 1970s novels by Pynchon, Kathy Acker, Ishmael Reed, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gerald Vizenor towards a second monograph currently in progress. Further interests include literary representations of gender and sex, intersections between politics and economy in fiction, and twenty-first century critical approaches.

Bio: Jo Freer attended state school in Leicester, going on to study for a BA in English literature with Italian at the University of Sussex. During her degree she spent a year as an Erasmus exchange student at Università degli Studi di Roma Tre, in Rome. After graduating she taught English language for a year in Valencia, Spain, returning to the UK in 2006 to undertake the MA in English: Issues in Modern Culture at University College London. In 2008 she began her PhD in American Literature at the University of Sussex. After working at Sussex as an Associate Tutor, she took up her role at the University of Exeter in 2015.