Office Phone: 416-588-5558
Office Location: NF 324
E-mail: e.cazdyn@utoronto.ca
Office Hours and/or Leave Status: TBA
Degrees: PhD Literature, University of California, San Diego; MA Comparative Literature, UCSD; BA Political Science and International Relations.
Eric Cazdyn is distinguished professor of aesthetic and politics, located in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of East Asian Studies, also affiliated with cinema studies, the Literature and Critical Theory Program, and U of T’s new Global Institute of Psychosocial, Palliative & End-of-Life Care. Eric Cazdyn’s research invariably revolves around the same problem: how impossibilities of all kind (political, aesthetic, personal) are engaged . . . and how such engagements enliven us and the world, effectively changing what is possible. This scholarly obsession informs the courses Cazdyn teaches, from critical and cultural theory, psychoanalysis, Marxism, film and video to architecture, illness, literature and Japan. Cazdyn has written four books and scores of articles, and is a noted speaker around the world. In 2012 Cazdyn won the three-year Mellon Foundation's New Directions Fellowship, for which he built an experimental film practice in coordination with his theoretical questions regarding aesthetics and politics. Cazdyn's films have been screened and performed in Japan, Taiwan, Canada, the U.S., the U.K., and throughout Europe. Cazdyn has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Sao Paulo, Central European University, the University of Alberta, and King's College (Halifax) as well as artist-in-residence at the Cube Cinema (Bristol) and, in January 2016, at Gallery TPW (Toronto).
Selected Publications:
- Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (with Marcus Boon and Timothy Morton) (Forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2015);
- The Already Dead: The New Time of Politics, Culture and Illness (Duke, 2012);
- After Globalization (with Imre Szeman) (Wiley Blackwell, 2011);
- The Flash of Capital: Film and Geopolitics in Japan (Duke 2003);
- Trespasses: Selected Writings of Masao Miyoshi, Editor (Duke, 2010); and
- Disastrous Consequences, Editor (SAQ, 2007).