Tom Ratekin

Assistant Professor
Department of Literature

• Professor Ratekin teaches courses in twentieth-century literature and film. His interests include modern British, American, and world literature, postmodernism, literary theory, consumer culture, psychoanalysis, genre studies and the memoir. His book, Final Acts: Traversing the Fantasy in the Modern Memoir was published in 2009 as part of the SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture.  He is currently at work on a second book project entitled The Aesthetics of Everyday Life: Literature and Consumer Culture, which explores the ways in which commodities function as intermediaries between self and other, the tangible and the numinous. The book contends that our nuanced understanding of everyday objects enables late-modern subjects to experiment with different identities and new social orders.

• Degrees

  PhD, Columbia University
  AB, Brown University

• Favorite Spot on Campus:

  The Bunker