Heather J. Hicks

Class Year

1996

Professional Background

Professor of English at Villanova for 28 years.

How has your English degree from Duke shaped your work life?

I received an excellent graduate education from Duke. It permitted me to step into an academic position seamlessly when I entered the academic job market in 1996.

Professional Projects:

Books The Post-Apocalyptic Novel in the Twenty-First Century: Modernity Beyond Salvage. New York: Palgrave, 2016. The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative. New York: Palgrave, 2009. Articles and Book Chapters: " “Stripped of These Things They Were Kin”: Tracking Judith Butler’s Post-9/11 Conception of Vulnerability in Recent Apocalyptic Fiction,," in ed. Pier Paolo Piciucco, Contemporary Vulnerabilities. Nuovo Trauben, 2023. "'Enough to Change a Planet': Feeling Extinction in Contemporary Literature." Reconsidering Extinction in Terms of the History of Global Bioethics. Ed. Stan Booth and Chris Mounsey. New York: Routledge, 2021. 1-26 “Disaster Response in Post-2000 American Apocalyptic Fiction.” Apocalypse in American Literature and Culture. Ed. John Hay. New York: Cambridge UP, 2020. 212-224. "Smoke Follows Beauty": The Femme Fatale and the Logic of Apocalyptic Affiliation in Claire Vaye Watkins's Gold Fame Citrus", ASAP/Journal 3.3 (2018): 623-651. "Apocalyptic Fiction, 1950-2015", Oxford Research Encyclopedia. March 2017. https://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.190. "This Time Round": David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and the Apocalyptic Problem of Historicism." Postmodern Culture 20:3 (2011). "Impalement: Race and Gender in Bryan Singer's X-Men." CineAction 85 (2011): 52-63. "Suits vs. Skins: Immigration and Race in Men in Black." Arizona Quarterly 63:2 (2007): 109-136. "Hoodoo Economics: White Men's Work and Black Men's Magic in Contemporary American Film." Camera Obscura 53 (2003): 27-55. "On Whiteness in T. Coraghessan Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain." Critique 45 (2003): 43-64. "This Strange Communion': Surveillance and Spectatorship in Ann Petry's The Street." African American Review 37 (2003): 21-37. "Rethinking Realism in Ann Petry's The Street." MELUS 27 (2002): 89-105. "Striking Cyborgs: Reworking the "Human"" in Marge Piercy's He, She, and It." Reload: Rethinking Women and Cyberculture . ed. Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. 85-106. "Postindustrial Striptease: The Full Monty and the Feminization of Work." Colby Quarterly 36 (2000): 48-59. "Automating Feminism: The Case of Joanna Russ's The Female Man." Postmodern Culture 9:3 (1999). "'Whatever It Is That She's Since Become': Writing Bodies of Text and Bodies of Women in James Tiptree, Jr.'s 'The Girl who Was Plugged in' and William Gibson's 'The Winter Market'." Contemporary Literature 37 (1996): 62-93. "Paper Mills ." This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class. ed. Carolyn Leste Law & E.L. Barney Dews. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995.