Department of English

Phillip Wegner joined the UF faculty in 1994. He received his BA from California State University, Northridge, where he was named the recipient of the Wolfson Scholar Award for 1986; and his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993, where he was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. He was the Coordinator of the Graduate Program from 2009 to 2012 and the Associate Graduate Coordinator from 2005-2009, and he founded the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory at UF in 2015. He was named a University Research Foundation (UFRF) Professor in 2010 and the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in English in 2012. He was the president for The Society for Utopian Studies from 2010-2014, and received the Society’s Lyman Tower Sargent Award for Distinguished Scholarship in 2017.

Professor Wegner is the author of four books, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (2002); Life Between Two Deaths: U.S. Culture, 1989-2001 (2009); Periodizing Jameson: Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative (2014); and Shockwaves of Possibility: Essays on Science Fiction, Globalization, and Utopia (2014). He has published more than 50 essays on topics including contemporary literature and film, twentieth-century culture, genre theory, utopian fiction, literary theory, cultural studies, Marxism, spatial theory, globalization, and science fiction. He has presented major lectures at universities across the United States, as well as in Ireland, Cyprus, Germany, Sweden, and Greece. His forthcoming book is entitled, Reading Theory and Utopia in Dark Times, and he has begun work on a new book entitled, A Return to the Scene of the Postmodern; or, Why 1984 Wasn’t Like 1984. He is a multiple recipient of UF Teaching Awards, and teaches a wide range of courses, including most recently, undergraduate courses on contemporary world fiction, literary theory, and modernist British literature; and graduate seminars on the dialectical theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, and the Künstlerroman.