Sean Cashbaugh

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of American Studies and Cultural Studies. My areas of expertise include American literary and cultural history, cultures of American radicalism, political aesthetics, cultural theory, science fiction, underground culture, and composition pedagogy.

My scholarship revolves around two broad questions. First, how have individuals and collectives of the twentieth century theorized and creatively realized radical political projects in their own languages and forms ? This question animates an ongoing book project tentatively titled Underground Culture: Excavating the History of an Alternative, which explores the history of the idea of “underground culture” in the American twentieth century, rooting it in postwar debates about politics, aesthetics, and the nation’s changing political-economic terrain. I examine the work of Black ex-communists, white hipsters, anti-academic poets, queer filmmakers, and independent journalists, connecting communities typically treated separately to historicize “the underground” as many have the avant-garde. Second, how can we better conceptualize the politics of culture in materialist terms? I am interested in the ways cultural practices can be constitutive of the human capacity of labor, a perspective that reframes debates about cultural politics in terms of human sustenance and care.

• Teaching Assistant Professor in the First Year Experience and Humanities, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2024-Present
• Lecturer, Princeton Writing Program, Princeton University, 2018-2024
• Professional Writing Consultant and Adjunct Instructor, Stevens Institute of Technology, 2016-2018
• Instructor, Department of American Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 2013-2015
• Instructor, Department of Rhetoric and Writing, University of Texas at Austin, 2010-2012
• Writing Consultant, Undergraduate Writing Center, University of Texas at Austin, 2010-2012

Articles
Cashbaugh, Sean. “Back to Basics with Labor-Power: The Problem of Culture and Social Reproduction Theory,” Lateral 10, no. 2 (Fall 2021), https://doi.org/10.25158/L10.2.3.

Cashbaugh, Sean.“Marxism and American Culture,” Syllabus 7, no. 1 (Spring 2018). https://syllabusjournal.org/index/php/syllabus/article/view/233

Cashbaugh, Sean. “Hipness Left Behind: White Encounters with Hip in the Early Twentieth Century,” Quarterly Horse: A Journal of Brief American Studies 1, no. 2 (Winter 2017). https://doi.org/10.17613/M6833MZ0S.

Cashbaugh, Sean. “A Paradoxical, Discrepant, and Mutant Marxism: The Emergence of a Radical Science Fiction in the American Popular Front,” The Journal for the Study of Radicalism 10, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 63-106. https://doi.org/10.14321/jstudradi.10.1.0063.

Essays in Edited Collections
Cashbaugh, Sean. “Wrecking a Sentence.” In Pocket Instructor: Writing, edited by Amanda Irwin Wilkins and Keith Shaw. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2024.

Selected Book Reviews
Cashbaugh, Sean. Review of Autonomy, Refusal, and the Black Bloc: Positioning Class Analysis in Critical and Radical Theory by Robert T. Carley. Journal for the Study of Radicalism 15, no. 1 (2021): 167-169.

Cashbaugh, Sean. Review of Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory by Enzo Traverso. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews (January 2018). http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49069.

Cashbaugh, Sean. Review of Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff by Anatole Dolgoff. H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews (February 2017). http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47425.

Cashbaugh, Sean. Review of American Pulp: How Pulp Magazines Brought Modernism to Main Street by Paula Rabinowitz. Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis 80, no. 3 (July 2016): 422-424.

Courses Taught at Stevens
• Hass 105: Knowledge, Nature, Culture (Futures)
• HASS 103: Writing and Communications (Community)
• PRV 101: First Year Experience

Past Courses
• American Dissent
• Marxism and American Culture
• Rhetoric of Science Fiction
• Rhetoric and Writing