Clint Burnham

Areas of interest

Clint Burnham's research interests include cultural studies (especially film and popular culture), contemporary poetry, and theory (especially psychoanalysis and Marxism).

Education

• BA, MA (Victoria)
• PhD (York)

Biography

Clint Burnham was born in Comox, British Columbia, which is on the unceded traditional territory of the K’ómoks (Sahtloot) First Nation, centred historically on kwaniwsam. He lives and teaches on the unceded traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples, including the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw), Tsleil-Waututh (səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ), Musqueam (xʷməθkʷəy̓əm), and Kwikwetlem (kʷikʷəƛ̓əm) Nations.

He is the author of book-length studies of Steve McCaffery, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek. He is also the author of numerous books of poetry and fiction; his novel Smoke Show was published by Arsenal Pulp in 2005, his most recent book of poetry, Pound @ Guantánamo, was published in 2016 by Talonbooks, and his latest fiction collection, White Lie, by Anvil in 2021. A poetry collection is in press, and in 2022, poems appeared in The Capilano Review (50th anniversary issue), Some (fifth issue), and Ludd Gang. Clint has written on art for The Capilano Review, ESPACE art actuel, fillip, Flash Art, Camera Austria, The Vancouver Sun, Canadian Art, Artforum, and The Globe and Mail. He co-edited Digital Natives (Other Sights) with Lorna Brown, From Text to Txting (Indiana) with Paul Budra, and an issue of Canadian Literature on 21st century poetics with Christine Stewart; he is the author of The Only Poetry that Matters: Reading the Kootenay School of Writing (Arsenal Pulp). Recent academic writing often treats the COVID-19 pandemic alongside psychoanalysis, racist violence, and climate disasterism, and includes essays in Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance: Lacanian Perspectives (Routledge, 2022); Understanding Žižek, Understanding Modernism (Bloomsbury 2023); Global Pandemics and Epistemic Crises in Psychology (Routledge 2021); and the journals Canadian Literature, symplokē, and esc: English Studies in Canada. Other essays on theory and digital culture have appeared in or are forthcoming in Historical Materialism, Rethinking Marxism, CLCWeb, Continental Thought and Theory, [Un] Grounding: Post-Foundational Geographies of Space (transcript, 2021), and Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism (ed. Thomas Waller, Bloomsbury). His latest academic tome is Lacan and the Environment (Palgrave, 2021), co-edited with Paul Kingsbury. His current book project is on Lacan and the Plague. Does the Internet have an Unconscious? Slavoj Žižek and Digital Culture appeared in 2018 from Bloomsbury, which also published his Fredric Jameson and “The Wolf of Wall Street”, in 2016. He has also recently appeared in podcasts with Žižek & So On, Mary Wild’s Projections, and Morbid Anatomy. Current research and creative interests include, in addition to the above, psychoanalysis and the environment, appropriation techniques, and so-called “research waste.”

Clint has been a member of the SFU English department since 2007; before that he taught at UBC, Capilano College, and Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. He has supervised doctoral students writing on photography and intimacy (Alison Dean) on sound archives (Deanna Fong), on theories of search (Alois Sieben), and on allegory and intoxication (Ed Graham – co-supervised with Prof. Lesjak); he is presently supervising dissertations on post-humanism (Ziwei Yan) and psychoanalysis and Palestine (Rawia Inaim – co-supervised with Prof. Smith). Clint is an associate member of the SFU Department of Geography and a member of SFU’s Centre for Global Political Economy.