Faculty and Staff

Anthony Grajeda

Anthony Grajeda, Ph.D.

Education

  • Ph.D. in Modern Studies, Department of English from The University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee (2001)

Selected Publications

Books

  • Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Co-Edited by Timothy D. Taylor and Mark Katz. Duke University Press, 2012

  • Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, editors, Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008) and in translation: Chinese (Beijing: China Film Press, 2013)

Articles/Essays

  • “The ‘Sweet Spot’: The Technology of Stereo and the Field of Auditorship,” in eds., Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everett, Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 37-63.

  • “Post-War Postponed: War without End, the Returning Soldier in American Cinema, and the Gendered Representation of Trauma,” Special Issue on “Media, Technology and the Culture of Militarism,” eds., Robin Andersen and Tanner Mirrlees, Democratic Communiqué (Vol. 26, No. 2, Fall 2014), 55-71.

  • “Early Mood Music: Edison’s Phonography, American Modernity and the Instrumentalization of Listening,” in Marta García Quiñones, Anahid Kassabian and Elena Boschi, eds., Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate, 2013), 31-47.

  •  “’A Question of the Ear’: Listening to Touch of Evil,” in Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 201-217.

  • “The Winning and Losing of Hearts and Minds: Vietnam, Iraq, and the Claims of the War Documentary,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 49 (Spring 2007), 38 ms. pages; 41 web pages: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc49.2007/Grajeda/index.html.

  • “Picturing Torture: Gulf Wars Past and Present,” in Andrew Martin and Patrice Petro, eds., Rethinking Global Security: Media, Popular Culture, and the “War on Terror” (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 206-235.

  • “Disasterologies,” Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, special issue on “After Social Construction: Technology, Knowledge, and Society” 19:4 (October-December  2005), 315-319.

  • "The Sound of Disaffection," in Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc, eds., Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 357-375.

  • "The 'Feminization' of Rock," in Roger Beebe, Denise Fulbrook and Ben Saunders, eds., Rock Over the Edge: Transformations of Popular Music Culture (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 233-254.

Book Sections/Chapters

  • “Introduction: Cinema,” in Timothy D. Taylor, Mark Katz and Tony Grajeda, editors, Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 137-44, 378-82.

  • Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda, “Introduction: The Future of Film Sound Studies,” in Beck and Grajeda, eds., Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 1-20.

Miscellaneous Publications

  • Journals (Guest Editor)  

    Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2:2 (Autumn 2008 [published 2009]), Special Issue on “The Future of Sound Studies,” co-edited with Jay Beck, with co-authored introduction, 109-114.

Courses

No courses found for Spring 2026.

No courses found for Fall 2025.

No courses found for Summer 2025.

Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
19240 LIT3393 Lit & Culture of Trauma In Person (P) Tu,Th 12:00 PM - 01:15 PM Unavailable
POST-1865 LITERARY HISTORY CLASS.<br><p>According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, “70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives.” While a stubborn stigma remains attached to the public debate on mental health, such a debate has nonetheless increasingly recognized that trauma has become a common feature of contemporary life, leading some observers to claim that we live in an “age of trauma.” <span>Indeed, everyday depictions of trauma populate the cultural landscape, afflicting such fictionalized characters as Katniss Everdeen in <i>The Hunger Games</i> sequels, Tony Stark in <i>Iron Man 3</i>, and Wanda Maximoff of Marvel’s Disney+ series, <i>WandaVision</i>. </span>This new undergraduate course in the Department of English <span>will join the burgeoning field of what’s become known as trauma studies in the humanities by taking up the <i>representation</i> of trauma in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Although we will draw on scholarship conversant with the medical humanities, for the most part our attention will be given to the ways by which trauma, variously conceived and rendered in narrative form, appears in literary works (novels, short stories, and poems), along with a few films (fiction, documentary, and animated).</span></p>
18848 LIT6936 Studies in Lct Theory In Person (P) W 06:00 PM - 08:50 PM Unavailable
By the end of the 20th Century, a number of academic disciplines across the humanities and social sciences had taken the cultural “turn” toward what is now called cultural studies, an interdisciplinary approach to the increasing importance of culture to “post-industrial” consumer societies. And while English departments and literary studies have adopted cultural studies as a generalized theoretical paradigm, encompassing everything from reader-response and new historicism to neo-marxian and post-colonial theory, a more specific lineage can be traced back to the formation of British cultural studies and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (BCCC). This course will examine a selection of texts produced by the “culturalist” tradition associated with the BCCC, exploring as well some of its continuing influences in contemporary debates over mass culture and popular culture, ideology and communication, modernism and postmodernism, and the often fraught nexus of intellectual work and politics.
Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
91361 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable

Prerequisite: ENC 1102 with a 'C' (2.0) or higher.

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial theory, race and ethnic studies, reader response, disability studies, and eco-criticism. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework.
91530 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable

Prerequisite: ENC 1102 with a 'C' (2.0) or higher.

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial theory, race and ethnic studies, reader response, disability studies, and eco-criticism. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework.
93703 LIT3605 Literature and War In Person (P) Tu,Th 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM Unavailable

Prerequisite: ENC 1102 with a 'C' (2.0) or higher.

Applies as:

  • POST-1865 LITERARY HISTORY

This course will explore the complex relation between literature and war in the 20th Century by pursuing a set of questions for which there are no easy answers: To what extent has literature been responsible for mythologizing war and thus reproducing the very desire that makes militarism alluring? Is literature capable of conveying what war is like through a conventional aesthetic of realism or are other literary modes better equipped to represent such brutal reality? Is there a limit to the capacity of literature to document the horrors of war, horrors that are otherwise unspeakable? Is literature tasked by society with an obligation to act as the conscience of a nation, a form of ethical reflection on the causes and consequences of war? While the course will mostly focus on more traditional forms of literature (poetry, fiction, memoir), we will also make use of recent developments in literary theory that have expanded the notion of a “text,” allowing us to include a wider range of cultural forms (graphic novel, documentary and fiction film, online sources).
Course Number Course Title Mode Session Date and Time Syllabus
60521 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) A 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable
Prerequisite: ENC 1102 with a 'C' (2.0) or higher.

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial theory, race and ethnic studies, reader response, disability studies, and eco-criticism. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework.


Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
10917 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable
“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial theory, race and ethnic studies, reader response, disability studies, and eco-criticism. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework.
19900 LIT3393 Lit & Culture of Trauma In Person (P) Tu,Th 12:00 PM - 01:15 PM Unavailable
According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, “70% of adults in the U.S. have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives.” While a stubborn stigma remains attached to the public debate on mental health, such a debate has nonetheless increasingly recognized that trauma has become a common feature of contemporary life, leading some observers to claim that we live in an “age of trauma.” Indeed, everyday depictions of trauma populate the cultural landscape, afflicting such fictionalized characters as Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games sequels, Tony Stark in Iron Man 3, and Wanda Maximoff of Marvel’s Disney+ series, WandaVision. This new undergraduate course in the Department of English will join the burgeoning field of what’s become known as trauma studies in the humanities by taking up the representation of trauma in a wide range of literary and cultural texts. Although we will draw on scholarship conversant with the medical humanities, for the most part our attention will be given to the ways by which trauma, variously conceived and rendered in narrative form, appears in literary works (novels, short stories, and poems), along with a few films (fiction, documentary, and animated).
Course Number Course Title Mode Date and Time Syllabus
80633 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial and race theory, reader response, eco-criticism, and disability studies. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework. Students should emerge from this course with the ability to read texts from a variety of different critical perspectives and perform research at an appropriately advanced undergraduate level.

80804 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial and race theory, reader response, eco-criticism, and disability studies. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework. Students should emerge from this course with the ability to read texts from a variety of different critical perspectives and perform research at an appropriately advanced undergraduate level.

93514 ENG6078 Contemp Movements Lct Theory In Person (P) Tu 06:00 PM - 08:50 PM Unavailable

This course, a requirement for the master’s degree in Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies, will provide students with a rigorous overview of the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will examine many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststucturalism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial and race theory, reader response, disability studies, and eco-criticism. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. The seminar will act as a forum to engage with the current scholarly debate in literary and cultural studies, preparing students to work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in keeping with graduate-level coursework.
Course Number Course Title Mode Session Date and Time Syllabus
50416 ENG3014 Theories and Tech of Lit Study Web-Based (W) A 12:00 AM - 12:00 AM Unavailable

“Theories of Literature” is a gateway course designed to introduce students to the theory and practice of contemporary approaches to the academic study of literary and cultural texts. The course will cover many of the most prominent and influential “schools of thought” or critical theories of literature, including New Criticism, structuralism, poststructuralism/deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, sexuality/queer studies, Marxism, new historicism, postcolonial and race theory, reader response, eco-criticism, and disability studies. We will study explanatory texts about the various theories, along with representative texts of theory itself. We will also apply these approaches to literary and cultural texts ranging from canonical works to popular forms (such as film). We will engage with the scholarly debate in literary studies and work toward the construction of an advanced analytical paper in preparation for 4000-level coursework. Students should emerge from this course with the ability to read texts from a variety of different critical perspectives and perform research at an appropriately advanced undergraduate level.

Updated: Aug 17, 2024