Our Faculty

Biography

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is a Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is also Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute, past president of the Society for Comparative Literature and the Arts, and a former member of the Modern Language Association Delegate Assembly (Teaching as Profession).

He is editor-in-chief of the American Book Review, which was awarded the University of Houston System Board of Regents Award for Academic Excellence (2016), and founder and editor of the journal symploke, which was awarded the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement (2000) and a Best Special Issue Award (2012) by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ). He is also an area editor of Oxford Bibliographies—Literary and Critical Theory, series editor of Anthem symploke Studies in Theory, and series co-editor of Palgrave Studies on Global Policy and Critical Futures in Education.

Publications

Theory as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Out of Print (Broadstone, 2024)

Dark Academe: Capitalism, Theory, and the Death Drive in Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)

Theory Conspiracy (Routledge, 2024; with Frida Beckman)

Left Theory and the Alt-Right (Routledge, 2024; with Sophia A. McClennen)

Selling the Humanities (Texas Review Press, 2023)

Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Understanding Žižek / Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2023; with Zahi Zalloua)

Happiness (Routledge, 2022)

Understanding Barthes / Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2022; with Zahi Zalloua)

Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory (Bloomsbury, 2021; with Christian Moraru)

Catastrophe and Higher Education: Neoliberalism, Theory, and the Future of the Humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Vinyl Theory (Lever Press, 2020)

Philosophy as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020)

Biotheory: Life and Death under Capitalism (Routledge, 2020; with Peter Hitchcock)

What's Wrong with Antitheory? (Bloomsbury, 2020)

The End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (Texas Review Press, 2019)

Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019)

The Debt Age (Routledge, 2018; with Peter Hitchcock and Sophia McClennen) 

Experimental Literature: A Collection of Statements (JEF Books, 2018; with Warren Motte)

Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

American Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017)

Dead Theory: Derrida, Death, and the Afterlife of Theory (Bloomsbury, 2016)

The New Public Intellectual: Politics, Theory, and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016; with Peter Hitchcock)

Criticism after Critique: Literature, Aesthetics and the Political (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Turning the Page: Book Culture in the Digital Age—Essays, Reflections, Interventions (Texas Review Press, 2014)

Capital at the Brink: Overcoming the Destructive Legacies of Neoliberalism (Open Humanities Press, 2014; with Uppinder Mehan)

Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013)

Neoliberalism, Education, Terrorism: Contemporary Dialogues (Routledge, 2013; with Henry Giroux, Sophia McClennen, and Ken Saltman)

Terror, Theory, and the Humanities (Open Humanities Press, 2012; with Uppinder Mehan)

Academe Degree Zero: Reconsidering the Politics of Higher Education (Routledge, 2011; paperback, 2012)

Federman's Fictions: Innovation, Theory, and the Holocaust (State University of New York Press, 2011)

“The Cult of the Book—and Why It Must End.” The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of Higher Education, section B (1 October 2010): B8-B9.

“Against Rank.” Inside Higher Ed. June 25, 2010. www.insidehighered.com.

“In Praise of Tough Criticism.” The Chronicle Review. Chronicle of Higher Education, section B (18 June 2010): B4-B5.

“Against Anonymity.” Inside Higher Ed. July 7, 2009. www.insidehighered.com.

Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation (State University of New York Press, 2007; with R. M. Berry)

From Socrates to Cinema: An Introduction to Philosophy (McGraw Hill, 2005)

On Anthologies: Politics and Pedagogy (University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

If Classrooms Matter: Progressive Visions of Educational Environments (Routledge, 2004; with Walter Jacobs)

Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture (University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

Morality Matters: Race, Class, and Gender in Applied Ethics (McGraw-Hill, 2002)