Clint Burnham

He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. He is also the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction; his novel Smoke Show was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2005, his most recent book of poetry, The Goldberg Variations, was published in 2024 by New Star, and his latest fiction collection, The Old Man: New Stories, was published as a chapbook by above/ground, also in 2024. Poems have also appeared in The Capilano Review (50th anniversary issue), Some (fifth issue), Ludd Gang and in a collaborative leaflet (with Chris Turnbull) from Tangent. Clint has written on art for The Capilano Review, ESPACE art actuel, fillip, Flash Art, Camera Austria, The Vancouver Sun, Canadian Art, Artforum, and The Globe and Mail. He co-edited Digital Natives (Other Sights) with Lorna Brown, From Text to Txting (Indiana) with Paul Budra, and an issue of Canadian Literature on 21st century poetics with Christine Stewart; he is the author of The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Arsenal Pulp). Recent academic writing often treats the COVID-19 pandemic alongside psychoanalysis, racist violence, and climate disasterism, and includes essays in Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2022); Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury 2023); Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology (Routledge 2021); and the journals Canadian Literature, symplokē, and esc: English Studies in Canada. Other essays on theory and digital culture have appeared in or are forthcoming in Historical Materialism, Rethinking Marxism, CLCWeb, Continental Thought and Theory, [Un] Grounding: Post-Foundational Geographies of Space (transcript, 2021), and Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism (ed. Sinan John-Richards and Thomas Waller, Bloomsbury).

This past spring he participated in an online symposium in honor of Fredric Jameson’s 90^th birthday, including a blog post on the Verso site; an essay on “TikTok dialectics” is forthcoming in a Jameson festschrift from Duke press. His latest academic tome is Lacan and the Environment (Palgrave, 2021), co-edited with Paul Kingsbury (SFU GEOG). Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture appeared in 2018 from Bloomsbury, which also published his Fredric Jameson and “The Wolf of Wall Street”, in 2016. He has also recently appeared in podcasts with Lacan in Scotland, Žižek & So On, Mary Wild’s Projections, and Morbid Anatomy. His current book project, under contract with Routledge, is a short monograph on Mari Ruti and climate grief.

Clint has been a member of the SFU English department since 2007; before that he taught at UBC, Capilano College, and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He has supervised doctoral students writing on photography and intimacy (Alison Dean) on sound archives (Deanna Fong), on theories of search (Alois Sieben), on poetry and humor (Scott Innis at UBC – co-supervised with Prof. Larissa Lai) and on allegory and intoxication (Ed Graham – co-supervised with Prof. Lesjak); he is presently supervising dissertations on post-humanism (Ziwei Yan) and psychoanalysis and Palestine (Rawia Inaim – co-supervised with Prof. Smith). Clint is coordinator of the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows in the Humanities and serves on the FASS Reconciliation Working Group. He is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy.