I received my PhD from Rutgers in 2012 and joined UC Berkeley's English department in 2015. My research interests include: 20th- and 21st-century British literature, fiction and drama in particular; literature and philosophy--especially philosophy of mind, language, and moral philosophy; the history of the novel; literary history; and the history of criticism.

I'm currently working on my book Word and Mind: Behaviorism and Literary Modernity, which shows how behaviorism fundamentally changed the way twentieth-century writers thought about the relationship between mind and text--and how behaviorism might do the same for contemporary criticism. Is literary language necessarily an externalization of thought, we might ask, or is it possible to talk about literature without worrying about dualism, self-knowledge, or the problem of other minds? In order to think about those questions, each chapter of Word and Mind pairs a key concept of behaviorism with a set of twentieth-century writers: IA Richards, the New Critics, and TS Eliot on behavior; introspection in the fiction of Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf; dualism in the dramas of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter; and stimuli  in the fiction of JM Coetzee. 

For copies of recent articles and papers: https://berkeley.academia.edu/JoshuaGang