Join us for a Works-in-Progress talk with Miranda Steege titled, "A Queer Academic Mystery"!

Miranda shares...

In my mystery novel, Or Else, a dysfunctional English department at a fictional Pittsburgh university fractures apart in a messy methodological debate about history, queerness, and the right way to do scholarship. Amidst the chaos, a graduate student disappears, another is murdered, and a private detective with his own secrets is called in to investigate. What began as an intellectual schism turns nastily personal, and the cost is the safety of the university’s most vulnerable students. I will read from the novel, and I will also discuss some adjacent writing: an academic dissertation and works of fanfiction purportedly written by the novel’s graduate student narrator. Overall, my project asks us to interrogate some of the foundational practices and premises of conventional academic writing, teaching, and community, arguing that what is intellectual, what is imaginative, and what is deeply personal cannot and should not be separated.

Miranda Steege is a Visiting Lecturer in Literature at the University of Pittsburgh. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Riverside. Her research areas include queer theory, fan studies, and nineteenth-century British literature and she is committed to interdisciplinary teaching and writing. She has a hybrid creative/critical writing practice, the most recent example of which is her dissertation, “Reading for a Queer Sexual Ethics: Victorian and Contemporary Modes of Intimacy.” This project intertwines a mystery novel about a dysfunctional Pittsburgh English department with scholarly writing on contemporary sexual politics via erotic fanfiction and Victorian texts about bodies.