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 20th- and 21st-Century French and Francophone Studies and Comparative Literature. As an alumnus of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, he is presently writing two book-length projects. The first, “Solar Energology: Reading the Damned Poetics of a Dying Earth,” responds to the Anthropocenic energy crisis by deriving a poetics from the alignment of a corpus of 20th- and 21st-century French and Francophone literature (with a particular focus on the Maghreb and Mauritius) with modern French philosophy (from Descartes to Meillassoux), contemporary critical theory (with a particular focus on negativity), and the burgeoning field of the energy humanities. This project demonstrates how this poetics at once deconstructs extractivist ideology and offers a renewable, solar-powered energy source in speculative thinking. The second draws on French structuralism, semiotics, epistemology, and technics to study the concepts of glitch, sensation, play, artifice, and intelligence in French and Francophone literature and media—from Surrealism, the new novel, and OuLiPo to the New French Extremity [cinéma du corps], experimental music, and video games.
He teaches and advises in topics on speculative fiction and the environmental humanities; modern French philosophy and contemporary critical theory; Maghrebian and Mauritian literature and film; race and apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies; coloniality and the fantastic; Surrealism; literary modernism and sensation; comic books and animation; video games and play; and, glitch, artifice, and intelligence.
Matharoo 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 a partner/collaborator with Vision Inclusive. He also makes noise music that mirrors his scholarship.
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.
"Towards an Anthropology of Astonishment." Relative Time/Little Time Proceedings II, special issue of Mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal, vol. 55, no. 2, 2022, pp. 127-43.
“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
Critical Game Studies Course Development Fund ("Playing with Glitch Aesthetics" to be taught in the Greenlaw Gameroom)
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 (also taught as Race and the Apocalypse)
FREN 590: Structuralism and Negativity
FREN 390: Le nouveau roman par les sens
FREN 379: Surrealisms (also taught as the Postcolonial Fantastic)
FREN 375: Le Maghreb: La poétique du désert
FREN 357: Les jeux (FC-AESTH)
FREN 351: Bandes dessinées (FC-AESTH)
ROML 89: Sense of Wonder: Energy and Science Fiction (FYS)