Christian Gerzso

Christian Gerzso was born in Mexico City, where he received his B.A. in English with honors from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2004. In 2012 he completed his Ph.D. in English at New York University, where he was a Mellon Foundation Fellow (2011-2012), with his dissertation The Labors of Leisure: The Intellectual Work of Wilde, Woolf, and Orwell.

Gerzso’s teaching emphases include late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British literature and culture; multidisciplinary humanities; theories and representations of labor; literature and imperialism; literary and visual modernisms and avant-gardes, and literary and critical theory. He teaches in the International Honors Program and the First-Year Experience Program. His IHON 112 course, a first-year seminar for the International Honors program, traces the emergence of the world-system brought about by European colonization after 1492 in literary, artistic, philosophical, and political texts written by European and colonial and post-colonial authors. Gerzso also teaches an IHON 257 on theories and representations of labor under capitalism since the Industrial Revolution, and has taught an IHON 257 course on the modern university in Britain for the International Honors Program at Oxford University, where he served as site director in fall 2018. His Writing 101 course focuses on visual art and culture, and in 2019-2020 he will teach an IHON 328 course on politics and utopia, focusing on theories and literary representations of political life and institutions in the 20th and 21st centuries. Gerzso has also taught courses on British modernism, the novel and visual culture, and modern and avant-garde drama for the Department of English.

His scholarship has the following areas of focus: theories of intellectual labor and the relationship between intellectuals and the State throughout the 20th century, particularly in Britain and Mexico; Mexican avant-gardes, and theories and literary representations of utopia and the State, from the early 20th century until today. He has examined the ways in which British literary writers theorized their intellectual labor at the turn of the 20th century, amid the consolidation of mass and commodity culture. In the context of post-revolutionary Mexico, his scholarship explores how the avant-garde group known as Estridentismo collaborated with State institutions, however briefly and with mixed results, in order to try to bring into being the utopian projects they crystallized in their literary and artistic work. Currently, Gerzso is working on a project that traces the reception of George Orwell’s dystopias, from the Cold War until today, and how they have been appropriated by capitalist thought; the project contrasts this reception with Orwell’s own active and nuanced interventions in the debates on the role of the State in the aftermath of WWII.

His scholarly publications include: “No Useless Labor: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and the Importance of Intellectual Work” [Textual Practice, 2019]; “Aesthetic Re-Imaginings of Mexican Sovereignty: Esrtidentismo’s Anti-Imperialist Avant-Garde” [History, Empire, Critique: New Essays in World Literature, edited by Asher Ghaffar, Routledge, 2018]; “Estridentistas de Estado: la colaboración de la vanguardia postrevolucionaria con el gobierno de Veracruz, 1925-1927” [Mitologías hoy, 2018], and “Xavier Icaza’s Untimely Avant-Garde” [The Battersea Review, 2016].

He is a member of the International Honors Program Steering Committee and the Division of Humanities Contingent Faculty Caucus, where he served as chair in 2016-2017.