Shelley Salamensky

• Assistant Professor
• Office: 3334 Macgowan
• E-mail:
• Phone: 310-204-1577

Biography

Professor Shelly Salamensky has worked creatively in, and written on, a wide array of forms: fiction, creative nonfiction, “performance” in our everyday lives, staged performance, film, media, and more. Her current book project, working-titled Homefulness — funded by a major grant from the American Council of Learned Societies — explores the ways in which we “act out” ideas of “home” and “homeland” in our “existentially homeless” modern, postmodern, or even “post-postmodern,” world. Her forthcoming book The Modern Art of Influence and the Spectacle of Oscar Wilde traces the roots of modern anxieties over performance as mysterious, magical pathway to cultural power, with Wilde as nineteenth-century precursor of contemporary phenomena such as American Idol. Professor Salamensky, who holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, is a Contributing Editor of The Los Angeles Review of Books, has won teaching awards, and has taught in both the U.K. and the U.S.