One of the stranger features of academic life is that friends and colleagues only ever want to talk about one’s unpublished work. “What are you working on now?” is the academic’s default icebreaker. A scholar publishes an important book and then discovers to her bafflement that no one ever brings it up again. Thinking disappears into print and falls silent.
This is where we talk to critical theorists and interdisciplinary humanists about work they have already published. Editors of boundary 2 or scholars in the boundary 2 orbit will hold or facilitate conversations with scholars about a significant book they have published in the past five years, asking them to revisit its arguments, respond to the scholarly reviews, update us on their thinking, and reflect on a book’s unfinished work.
1/ “Alexander R. Galloway — An Interview with McKenzie Wark” (April 2017)
2/ “Unearthly Sovereignties and the Unsovereign Earth: Arne De Boever in Conversation with Anthony McCann” (January 2020)
3/ “About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva” (February 2020)
4/ “Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy by Fred Moten” (May 2020)
5/ “Christian Thorne interviews Joe Cleary–World Literature Under American Supervision” (December 2023)
6/ “Christian Thorne Interviews Oded Nir–Searching for the Universal in Israel/Palestine” (September 17, 2024)