Timothy Bewes

Timothy Bewes is the Owen F. Walker Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at Brown University, positions he has held since 2023 and 2011, respectively. He joined Brown in 2004 as Assistant Professor, advancing through the ranks, and has served as Interim Chair of the Department of English (2022-2023) and Interim Director of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities (2019-2020). Prior to Brown, Bewes held teaching and research positions at the University of Sussex, University of North London, Liverpool John Moores University, and Brandeis University, along with postdoctoral fellowships at Brown’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and Department of Modern Culture and Media (2003-2004). He earned a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Sussex in 1996 with a dissertation on “Cynicism and Postmodernity,” an MA in English Literature (Critical Theory) from the same institution in 1993, and a first-class BA (Hons) in English Literature from the University of North London in 1992.

Bewes specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction, aesthetic theory, Marxist and poststructuralist literary theory, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and the politics and ethics of form in Literature. His monographs include Cynicism and Postmodernity (Verso, 1997), Reification, or The Anxiety of Late Capitalism (Verso, 2002), The Event of Postcolonial Shame (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age (Columbia University Press, 2022), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2022. He has edited volumes such as Georg Lukács: The Fundamental Dissonance of Existence (Continuum, 2011, with Timothy Hall), Jacques Rancière and the Novel (Duke University Press, 2014), and The Anagonist (Duke University Press, 2020). Notable articles include “Against Exemplarity: W. G. Sebald and the Problem of Connection” (Contemporary Literature, 2014), which won the L. S. Dembo Prize in 2015. Bewes has been an editor of Novel: A Forum on Fiction since 2005 and serves on the editorial board of New Formations since 1998. He convenes the Film-Thinking series at the Cogut Institute and teaches courses on contemporary fiction, critical theory, and aesthetics.

Professional Email: Timothy_Bewes@brown.edu