Stephen Schryer

Stephen Schryer’s areas of interest include 20th/21st century American literature, science fiction, African American literature and literary theory. His new book, Conservative Circuits: National Review’s Literary Network is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. It looks at the circle of writers and critics associated with National Review from the 1950s to the 1990s, including Jon Dos Passos, Whittaker Chambers, Hugh Kenner, Guy Davenport, Joan Didion, D. Keith Mano, Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. These writers shaped and legitimated American conservatism while exposing the movement’s resistance to expertise.

Stephen Schryer’s new project, tentatively titled “Neoliberal Science Fictions,” links the Golden Age of science fiction to the emergence of neoliberal theory in the 1940s and 1950s. This project reads science fiction writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Judith Merril as amateur economists; conversely, it explores the impact of science fiction tropes on neoliberal economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman.

Stephen Schryer supervises theses in all areas of American literature, especially American fiction from the 1930s to the present. Current member of the Graduate Academic Unit.