Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Matthew Kateb Goldman's research considers the constructed environments and contested subjectivities that take shape under liberal, racialized capitalism. He focuses on U.S. urban life (industrialization to the present) through a critical cultural studies prism, joining modern and contemporary cultural theory with textual, aesthetic, and historical analyses. Goldman is particularly interested in tracing the cultural-historical idea of the human being in U.S. metropolitan space. His dissertation project will use critical queer and minoritarian theories of the human to reconceptualize the New York City subway vis-a-vis the American urbanization, refusal, and transit of liberal humanism's imperial subject, "Man."