Josef Benson

Josef Benson offers courses in contemporary literature, African American literature, film, gender studies, poetry writing, fiction writing, and composition. He is the author of Bandits, Misfits, and Superheroes: Whiteness and Its Borderlands in American Comics and Graphic Novels (UP of Mississippi 2022), for which he and co-author Doug Singsen were nominated for the prestigious Will Eisner Comics Industry Award; Star Wars: The Triumph of Nerd Culture (Rowman & Littlefield 2020); J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: A Cultural History (Rowman & Littlefield 2018); and Hypermasculinities in the Contemporary Novel: Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin (Rowman & Littlefield 2014). Additionally, his work has appeared in over twenty publications, including: Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature in Transition, 1980-1990 (Cambridge UP), Journal of Medical Humanities, Journal of Bisexuality, Southwestern American Literature, The Raymond Carver Review, Saw Palm, Moon City Review, and The Adirondack Review. He holds creative writing degrees from Missouri State University and the University of South Florida as well as a Ph.D. in literature with a heavy emphasis in gender theory also from the University of South Florida, where he studied primarily with Susan Mooney, John Henry Fleming, and Jay Hopler. He is currently working on a book-length study of the Jeffrey Dahmer case.