Read our short interview with Alok Yadav to learn more about the resource he developed in preparation for Professor Fraser's visit
Access the bibliography here
Introduce yourself and your involvement with the CHR.
I'm a professor in the English department with interests ranging from eighteenth-century British literature to postcolonial studies and world literature. I'm also interested in literary theory, cultural and intellectual history, and the disciplinary history of literary studies. I've served on the Steering Committee of the Center for Humanities Research for the last few years and will take up the role of director of the CHR once Alison Landsberg steps down from that role next year.
Tell us about your interest in Professor Fraser's work.
I've been interested in Nancy Fraser's work since encountering her essay about Habermas's conception of the public sphere many years ago, but it's been an interest that has been repeatedly piqued rather than actually followed up properly. So, I'm very much looking forward to the CHR Symposium in April as a chance to feed that interest more directly!
Tell us about this bibliography you've developed and how it might be used by scholars within the Mason community (and beyond).
I wanted to get a better sense of the scope of Fraser's work, to figure out what I might read ahead of the symposium, so I started compiling a list of her writings. Given the volume of Fraser's writings over the past forty years and their rich critical engagements with political theory, feminism, and capitalism, this bibliographic compilation began to grow under my hands! At a certain point, the materials I had gathered seemed to me more comprehensive—and more up-to-date—than anything I'd encountered, so I thought the bibliography might be useful to others as well.
The bibliography is certainly not "complete" but since it includes Fraser's writings, reviews of her books, reprintings of her essays in various essay collections, interviews with Fraser, audio and video recordings of her lectures, interviews, and panel discussions, and secondary scholarship on her work, the bibliography gives a more comprehensive survey of her work than other existing resources. The materials in each section are arranged chronologically, so one can trace the development of Fraser's interests and arguments. A relatively comprehensive bibliography is a basic scholarly resource for serious engagement with an author, and I hope this bibliography helps further the already rich engagements with Fraser's work.
Because Fraser's work has been a significant point of reference for feminist work on the topics she engages with, and because her essays have been extensively reprinted, especially in collections of feminist theory, the bibliography also provides a fairly rich source for surveys of feminist theory, especially feminist political theory.
Some of the CHR's symposium participants might be encountering Professor Fraser's work for the first time. Where would you recommend they start?
Speaking as someone who's not in too different a situation—despite the surface familiarity with Fraser's work that compiling the bibliography has given me—I'm not necessarily in a great position to make recommendations! But I can mention two options that are always eligible: first, you can scan the bibliography and pick out titles that seem especially interesting to you, just based on your personal interests; secondly, you can focus on Fraser's more recent work, since that's most likely to resonate with her talk and her present perspective. In this second vein, I might recommend her co-authored manifesto, Feminism for the 99% (2019), which takes the form of eleven theses and runs to 85 pages, or her most recent book, Cannibal Capitalism (2022), which is about double that length. If you favor something to listen to, rather than a text to read, or you want to learn something about Fraser's intellectual and political formation, one of the interviews with her might be the best place to start. The bibliography lists over 30 interviews and talks since 2020, each ranging in length from about 20 minutes to about 2 hours. So you can find the size and the shape that seems most manageable to you!
Access the bibliography HERE
Register for the CHR's annual symposium (including keynote with Nancy Fraser) HERE
March 21, 2024