Brandon Truett

I earned a BA with distinction in English from the University of South Carolina (2011), during which I studied abroad at the Universidad de Granada. Afterward, I spent a year teaching English in Igualada, Spain and lived in Barcelona. I then completed a MA in English at the University of Colorado at Boulder (2014).

I am currently a 2019-20 Doctoral Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. My dissertation, “Art War: The Transnational Imaginary of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to the Present,” investigates the literary, visual, and material cultures of the Spanish Civil War, triangulating aesthetic productions and reproductions within the United States, Britain, and Spain. This project contends that through an analysis of the aesthetic and cultural objects of the Spanish Civil War—including visual art, photography, exhibitions, novels, poetry, and political magazines––we detect the surfacing of an idea of the global as it relates to the phenomenon of civil war. The chapters of this dissertation collectively advance my argument that the Spanish Civil War has been one of the most generative sites of a transnational imaginary of civil war that mediates our more abstract idea of civil war in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“Art War: The Transnational Imaginary of the Spanish Civil War, 1936 to the Present"

• “Fiber Optics.” Co-Authored with Bill Brown, Zoe B. Hughes, Andrew Bearnot, Jacob Harris, Andrew Pettinelli, Matthew Beeber, and Harrington Weihl (Forthcoming in Grey Room, Fall 2019)

• “Two Catalonia’s Pact of Forgetting.” Los Angeles Review of Books. January 11, 2019.

  “Materializing the Fascist Aesthetic in Three Guineas.” Special Issue on “Woolf and Materiality.” Ed. Derek Ryan. Virginia Woolf Miscellany 85 (Spring 2014): 25-28.

Art Criticism

• “‘The AIDS Crisis Is Still Beginning,’ Says Artist and Activist Gregg Bordowitz.”Hyperallergic. May 16, 2019.
• “Descending into Lee Bontecou’s Apocalyptic Voids.” Hyperallergic. February 8, 2019.

• Course Assistant, “Contemporary Art” (Spring 2019)
• Graduate Lecturer at the Pozen Center for Human Rights, “The Arts of Civil War” (Autumn 2018)
• Course Assistant, ENGL27010/47310: “The Matter of Black Lives: Hurston & Wright” (Spring 2018)
• Course Assistant, ENGL10400: “Introduction to Poetry” (Autumn 2017)
• Course Assistant, ENGL16550: “Shakespeare’s History Plays” (Autumn 2016)
• Teaching Assistant, ENGL1500: “The World in the Year 1000,” University of Colorado at Boulder (Spring 2013)
• Language and Culture Assistant, Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2011-2012)