Sean Singh Matharoo
Accepting graduate students
Education
Ph.D. [Comparative Literature (Interdisciplinary Studies)] University of California, Riverside, 2020M.A. [Comparative Literature (Interdisciplinary Studies)] University of California, Riverside, 2016B.A. [English] University of Florida, 2011
About Professor Matharoo
Sean Singh Matharoo is a transdisciplinary scholar of French- and English-language speculative literature, media, and philosophy, which he studies in the contexts of postcolonial studies, the energy humanities, and performance studies. As an alumnus of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is updating his doctoral thesis into a book, which is provisionally titled Solar Energology: Reading the Damned Poetics of a Dying Earth. Matharoo’s research responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources by studying how literature, media, and philosophy contribute to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to find, in language, the gift of solar-powered futures. Important to this project is a theoretical framework whose possibility conditions include: 1) Alexandre Kojève's later concept of “energology,” or the study of the mediation between the dialectic of ontology and phenomenology; 2) Georges Bataille's solar economy; 3) Claude Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology; and, 4) the vitalist-structuralist pluralism of francophone Belgian science-fiction author J.-H. Rosny aîné’s Les sciences et le pluralisme (1922), which he is translating into English.
Matharoo is also a noise musician whose collaborative pieces about the environment may be understood to problematize the presupposition of colonial-racial divisions in thinking and being.
He is Book Review Assistant Editor for Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, a lab affiliate with Energy Lab Today at Georgia Tech, and is a partner/collaborator with Vision Inclusive.
Publications, Articles, & Presentations
"Like the Playful Clones in the Forest: An Experiment in Reading Marie Darrieussecq's Notre vie dans les forêts as an Instance of AI." Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, vol. 27, no. 4, 2023, pp. 551-9.
“The Damned of the Alienocene: Reclaiming the Disaster.” Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, stratum 8, October 2020.
“Ubik Does Not yet Exist: Reading Philip K. Dick’s Ubik as a Case of Extro-Science Fiction.” Philip K. Dick: Essays of the Here and Now (Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy), edited by David Sandner, McFarland, 2020, pp. 61-70.
“Samuel R. Delany.” Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature, 2019, doi: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0198.
“A fata morgana at the end of the world, or towards the eco-racial disaster of J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.” J. G. Ballard and the Natural World, special issue of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, vol. 22, no. 4, 2018, pp. 366-380.
“‘A weird creature that’s operating in the theater’: Cult, synaesthesia and the ethico-politics of horror in Danny Perez and Animal Collective’s ODDSAC.” Sonic horror, special issue of Horror Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, Autumn 2016, pp. 275-291.
Awards & Honors
UNC-Chapel Hill Graduate Romance Association Faculty Mentor Award 2023
UC Riverside Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award 2019-2020
Finalist for the 2020 Walter James Miller Memorial for Student Scholarship in the International Fantastic
2017-2018 Fulbright U.S. Student Program Award (Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium)
Typical Courses
FREN 690: Artifice and Intelligence
FREN 390: Les jeux
FREN 379: Surrealisms
FREN 375: Le Maghreb : La poétique du désert
FREN 355: Les bandes dessinées