Assistant Professor

Full CV

Kyra Sutton received her Ph.D. in Rhetoric and Critical Theory from the University of California, Berkeley in 2024 and her B.A. in the College of Letters and French Studies from Wesleyan University. She specializes in contemporary Anglo-American literature, critical theory, and critical religion and secularism studies.

Her current book project, The Secular Undone: Contemporary Anglo-American Literature and the Question of Time, brings recent theoretical conversations in critical religion studies to bear on literary criticism, reading contemporary Anglo-American literature with an interest in how its forms upend and complicate standard definitions of “the secular modern.” This project assembles a disparate archive, from texts by authors such as Anne Carson, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Cormac McCarthy, Fred Moten, Maggie Nelson, and Ariana Reines, to examine how each defies the standard categories of the “religious” and “secular.” A second project rethinks the question of form and affect in the contemporary American novel against the background of neoliberal emotional exchange. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in CR: The New Centennial Review, qui parle, and edited volumes.