Stephen Schryer

Stephen Schryer’s areas of interest include 20th/21st century American literature, science fiction, African American literature, and literary theory. His current book 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 speculative writers like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Judith Merril, and George Schuyler as amateur economists; conversely, it explores the impact of science fiction tropes on economists like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman.

Stephen Schryer is the author of three books: National Review’s Literary Network: Conservative Circuits (Oxford University Press, 2024); Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty (Stanford University Press, 2018); and Fantasies of the New Class (Columbia University Press, 2011). He has published essays in PMLA, Post-45, Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, Science Fiction Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Arizona Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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.