Lawrence Grossberg

Co-Director of the University Program in Cultural Studies,
Morris Davis Distinguished Professor,
Distinguished Adjunct Professor of American Studies, 

Biography

I am from New York, where I attended Stuyvesant High School. I majored in Philosophy and Intellectual History (my advisor was Hayden White) at the University of Rochester. I studied with Stuart Hall at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham England, and then completed my PhD with James Carey at the Unviersity of Illinois. After teaching at Purdue for a year, and Illinois for over twenty, I was hired at UNC- Chapel Hill in 1994 to become the Morris Davis Distinguished Professor, and to help develop cultural studies in the department and as an interdisciplinary program. I have advised well over 50 doctoral students. And I am most proud of the awards I have won not only for my scholarship but for teaching and mentoring, from ICA, NCA, ACS and UNC. I have written about the specificity of cultural studies, developments in contemporary theory, U.S. popular music, youth culture and politics, the changing conditions of children in the U.S., the rise of new forms of conservatism and capitalism, countercultures, value theory, modernity, the state of progressive oppositional struggles in the US and the rise of populist conservatisms. And here I am!

Research Interests

Cultural studies, U.S. Political culture (conjunctures analyses), “Theory” (the history of philosophy, contemporary cultural theory). I am currently working on a critique of the ontological turn (Reality is bad enough, why bother with ontology), and an introduction to Theory (The relations of theory).

Recent Publications

“Pessimism of the Will, Optimism of the intellect.” Cultural Studies 32-6 (2018): 855-888.

“Cultural Studies in search of a method, or looking for conjunctural analysis.” New Formations, no. XX, (2019), pp. 38-68.

Under the cover of chaos: Trump and the Battle for the American Right (Pluto, 2018)

“Tilting at Windmills: A Cynical Assemblage of the Crises of Knowledge.” Cultural Studies, 2018.

Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History, ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack and Lawrence Grossberg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

With Bryan Behrenshausen, “Cultural studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 2: From affect to conjunctures.” Cultural Studies, 30:6 (2016): 1001-1028.

We all want to change the world: The paradox of the U.S. left (A Polemic). 2015. Available online.

“Learning from Stuart Hall.” Cultural Studies 29-1 (2015): 3-11.

“Cultural Studies and Deleuze-Guattari, Part 1: A Polemic on Project and Possibilities.” Cultural Studies 28-1 (2014): 1-28.

With Carey Hardin and Michael Palm, “Contributions to a Conjunctural Theory of Value.” Rethinking Marxism, 26-3 (2014): 306-335.