Marcus Heiligenthal

Marcus Heiligenthal earned his PhD in English, General Literature, and Rhetoric from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He specializes in contemporary American and global literatures and film, with an emphasis on renderings and radicalizations of the American frontier myth, justificatory narratives of exceptionalism and progress, and neoliberal economic theory. His research interests include transnational American studies, financialization and economic theory, critical algorithmic studies, postcolonial and critical theory, and radical pedagogies.

His most recent work, “Imperial Arbitrage: Global Precaritization, Human Rights, and the Financial Logic of Risk Management in the United States Drone Program,” can be found in the forthcoming edited collection Human Rights in the Age of Drones: Critical Perspectives on Post-9/11 Literature, Film and Art. His current project, Unsettling Economies: Neoliberalism, Precarity, and the Grammar of the Frontier in American Culture, examines the rise of the “American School” of neoliberalism; how popular American neoliberal discourses recode, re-entrench, and redeploy the myths and exceptionalisms of the American frontier; and how literature can serve as a platform of resistance, depicting “impossible communities” that imagine otherwise and challenge neoliberal hegemony. He has presented his work at conferences for the American Studies Association, the Modern Language Association, American Literature Association, and the Popular Cultural Association.