Overview
Dana Glaser is a literary critic and feminist whose work broadly examines the intersection of aesthetics and politics in the 20th century. Her first book-in-progress, Abstract, Literal, Reductive: How Feminism Thought, offers a new understanding of the conceptual legacy of mid-century feminism by reading the Second Wave as an irreducibly aesthetic movement. It takes up feminism's "bad" qualities, those judgments we commonly use to characterize its glaring mistakenness and naivete as a body of thought, qualities we have since felt compelled, almost repetitiously, to purge from nuanced, properly deconstructive political thinking generally, as objects of a formal literary analysis, signatures of a style writer-activists developed collaboratively and intentionally to do new kinds of symbolic work on gender. Glaser is also at work on a second book that writes the history of the overlooked, supposedly empty- and timeless concept "nonfiction," and the significance of its provincial, American, 20th century emergence for the intersection of knowledge and aesthetics. Her writing can be found in Signs and Chicago Review. Prior to joining Duke, Glaser was a postdoctoral fellow in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she earned her PhD in English in 2024.