Matthew Flisfeder

Title: Associate Professor
Phone: 204.786.9848
Office: 3G23
Building: Graham Hall
Email: m.flisfeder@uwinnipeg.ca

Degrees:

PhD Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, Ryerson and York Universities, 2010
MA Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture, Ryerson and York Universities, 2005
BA Honours Double Major in Communication Studies and Fine Arts Cultural Studies, York University, 2003

Biography:

Matthew Flisfeder is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Communications. Prior to joining the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications, Dr. Flisfeder was an Assistant Professor at Ryerson University.

Dr. Flisfeder has research and teaching interests in rhetoric and ideology, aesthetic theory and ethics, digital and cyberpunk culture, critical studies of social media, popular culture, critical theory, and cultural studies.

Dr. Flisfeder is the author of Algorithmic Desire: Toward a New Structuralist Theory of Social Media (Northwestern University Press, 2021), Postmodern Theory and Blade Runner (Bloomsbury 2017), The Symbolic, the Sublime, and Slavoj Žižek’s Theory of Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2012), and co-editor of Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).

Dr. Flisfeder is currently working on a project funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant called, “The Hysterical Sublime: A Critical Study of the Aesthetics, Rhetorics, and Ethics of New Materialist and Posthumanist Critical Theory.” Through a critical examination of New Materialist and Posthumanist critical theory, this project endeavours to produce a new theory of dialectical humanism for theorizing the twin dilemmas of anthropogenic climate change and the displacement of human agency by digital automation and artificial intelligence. Dialectical humanism aims to shift our critical gaze away from contradictory critiques of Anthropocentrism and the “Anthropocene,” and onto the structural contradictions of twenty-first century capitalism, or the “Capitalocene.”

Affiliations:

UW Affiliations:

UW Cultural Studies Research Group (CSRG), Researcher

Courses:

WINTER 2024

Research Interests:

• Aesthetic Theory
• Communication and Media Theory
• Critical Theory and Cultural Studies
• Critical Studies of Social Media
• Cyberpunk Culture
• Digital Culture and New Media
• Film and Visual Culture
• Ideology and Popular Culture
• Leftwing antisemitism
• Marxist Theory
• Neoliberalism
• Popular Culture
• Populism and Populist Rhetoric
• Posthumanism and New Materialism
• Postmodernism
• Rhetoric and Ethics