Dr. Sharon Becker, PhD

Biography

Dr. Becker teaches first year writing, American literature, and storytelling in K-pop videos, group storylines, and fan culture. She has also recently taught a course on semiotics through K-pop videos. Her research is currently focused on Korea’s N-po generation and how their concerns are reflected in contemporary K-pop videos. Her most recent conference presentations include “Crawling, Fighting, Bleeding, Now I'm Sick of It”: K-pop’s N-po Generation and “I’ll Give You My Blood”: Monsters, Murder, and Masculinity in the K-pop Gothic. She also has a chapter on gay celebrity autobiography in the forthcoming in A History of American Gay Autobiography from Cambridge University Press.

Research:

Current research includes analyses of two Manic Street Preachers’ albums: a study of the body as a vehicle of political resistance within the songs of The Holy Bible, and melancholia, Welsh identity, and the working class on Everything Must Go; Britpop, Cool Cymru and issues of nationhood in England and Wales in the 1990s; the formation of male identity in Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.

Publications:

Book review, Swimming in the Steno Pool: A Retro Guide to Making It in the Office by Lynn Peril. Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 41.5, July 2012

Guest editor, “Oh Pretty Boy, Can’t You Give Me Nothing But Surrender?: The Presence and Importance of Women in Punk Rock,” special issue of Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, January 2012

Co-author, with Wendy Martin: “The Cold War Novel: The American Novel Between 1945-1970” Blackwell Companion to the American Novel, Wiley-Blackwell (2011)

Co-editor, with Wendy Martin and Danielle Hinrichs: Anthology of the Short Story, Houghton Mifflin (2006)

Co-author, with Wendy Martin: “Eudora Welty,” “Mary McCarthy,” and “Women Writers of the Twentieth Century: An Overview” Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Oxford University Press (2004)

Recent conference presentations:

“’What a Lovely Nib Trout Fishing in America Would Make’: Writing Contemporary Manhood Into Existence in Trout Fishing in America”; American Literature Association Conference, Washington D.C., May 2014

“Bored Out of My Mind: The Manic Street Preachers and the Beauty of Boredom”; Popular Culture Association National Conference, Chicago, IL April 2014

“In The Drooping Hours: Melancholy and New Masculinity in This Side of Paradise”; American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA, 2013

“’The World is Wrong’: Tate Langdon, Kit Walker, and Perpetual Boyhood on American Horror Story”; Popular Culture Association National Conference, Washington D.C. 2013

“The Hard Times of Being a Modern Man: Economic Failure and Masculine Malaise in The Crack-Up Essays;” Fitzgerald in the 1930s: Trauma and Literary Celebrity; American Literature Association Conference, Boston, MA 2011

“Something, Someone, Some Spirit”: Haunted Masculinity and Kerouac’s Debt to Whitman in On the Road;” The Beats and Walt Whitman Conference, Brooklyn, New York, March 2010

Memberships/Affiliations:

Modern Language Association, F. Scott Fitzgerald Society, Richard Brautigan Society, Popular Culture Association