MICRO-BIO

• Tom Jacobs, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology-Old Wesbury campus. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from New York University. Tom has published work on the post-Depression ph...More

  Tom Jacobs, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of English at the New York Institute of Technology-Old Wesbury campus. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and his Ph.D. from New York University. Tom has published work on the post-Depression phototext and on the museum cultures of early New York City. He is currently at work on a book length manuscript that how U.S. writers of the 20th and 21st century use material and visual culture to explore the ways that unexpected encounters with particularly evocative objects and images can reorganize one’s sense of self, the past, and social relationships. From Flannery O’Connor’s investigations of how the mystifying experience of “grace” violently interrupts her characters’ mundane lives, to the ways the various artifacts collected by Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man transform his understanding of American history, to Walker Percy, Nicholson Baker, and David Foster Wallace’s intensive examinations of our affective attachments to everyday objects—all of these works examine how objects and images can defy and reorganize the ways we order and understand the world. By examining the uneasy exchanges between the systems and structures that define the world and the forces that undermine those structures, Tom’s work emphasizes the importance of ritual and the sacred in the both secular and religious worldviews. Less

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