Lee Konstantinou

Lee Konstantinou is Professor of English and Department Chair at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research and teaching focus on twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. literature and culture; postmodernist art and theory; media studies; as well as literary and cultural sociology.

He wrote the satirical novel Pop Apocalypse in 2009 (Ecco/HarperCollins), and his fiction has appeared in Post45: Contemporaries, Slate, ReGeneration: Telling Stories from Our Twenties, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, and Future Tense Fiction.
In 2012, with Samuel Cohen, he published an edited collection, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (University of Iowa Press).

His literary history Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction (Harvard University Press, 2016) discusses the fate of countercultural irony in the U.S. since 1945 and the rise of an ethos of postirony.

He recently published The Last Samurai Reread (Columbia University Press, 2022), a single-book study of Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, and he published the edited collection Artful Breakdowns: The Comics of Art Spiegelman (University Press of Mississippi, 2023) with Georgiana Banita, which assesses the legacy of Art Spiegelman’s long and storied career as a comics creator, editor, and advocate.

He’s currently working on a project entitled “Creator-Owned Comics,” which discusses the rise of an ideal and practice of creator-ownership in the comics world in the 1980s and 1990s.