Dr Kate Montague

I am Lecturer (E&S) in 20th/21st Century Literature, a post I have held since September 2020. My doctoral thesis, “Tragedy After 1945: Affect and Labor in the American Novel,” was completed in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. Passed without revisions in November 2018, the dissertation was supervised by Professors Sigi Jöttkandt and Julian Murphet, and examined by Professors J. Hillis Miller and Stephen Shapiro.

My first monograph, Tragedy, Affect, and Labor in American Literature, 1945-2020, is under contract with Cambridge University Press and is due to be published in 2025. This book examines a collection of postwar literary works and interrogates how the emergence of immaterial labor as the major form of waged work in the period—from creative and reproductive, through service and sex, to unemployment and new kinds of managerialism—is mediated into literary form as tragedy. Combining feminist literary theory with a critique of racial capitalism, it argues that the aesthetic tendency toward tragedy is a reaction to shifts in capitalist accumulation during the twentieth century and the accompanying global reorganization of wage labor.

My current research has shifted its focus to world literatures and cultures within the same period. This work has been interested in questions of literary affect and commodity production in developing economies localized to South America, the Caribbean, parts of Asia, and parts of Africa. I have been commissioned by Cambridge University Press to edit and introduce a second book, Tragedy and the World Literary System, for the Critical Concepts Series. This book will track the development of tragedy from around 1450 to the present and by looking at tragedy from all around the globe and with an emphasis on literary production in relation to empire.

I have forthcoming and contracted articles and chapters on lithium extraction in contemporary literature and visual art and the relationship between the prison system and social reproduction in the novels of Rachel Kushner.

I have also published on Cormac McCarthy, on Marxist Feminism, the economies of care and the Covid-19 Pandemic, and I have a recent essay on Kazuo Ishiguro's sicence fiction and the racialised and gendered labor of service economies. I have an adbiding interest in critical theory and continental philosophy. In this capacity I have edited a special edition of Filozofski vestnik, Reason+Enjoyment.

Extending my work beyond the academy, my research into the literature of South-West England and the world-system has made its way into more popular formats. I have appeared in a segment of Great British Railway Journeys for the BBC in 2020, as well as being intereviewed by Mariella Frostrup for an episode of Britain’s Novel Landscapes: Daphne du Maurier’s Cornwall, which aired on Channel 4 in 2022.