J. Paul Narkunas studied at the University of Pittsburgh, and taught at Penn State University--Erie, the Pratt Institute, and Princeton University before coming to John Jay in 2007.  Presently an Associate Professor of English, Narkunas regularly researches and teaches classes on how digital technologies and economic processes reorient historical concepts of the human and reality.  He is the author of Reifed Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition​ (Fordham University Press, 2018), a defense of speculative literatures as a strategy for struggling with speculative capital's reorganization of life.  He has published on such varied subjects as literary authors Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Chang-rae Lee, and pressing political concerns like human rights and war law, the Tea Party, market English, and "utilitarian humanism." He is currently working on two book length projects, Edufutures: Private Equity, Philanthropy and the Monetization of Education, and Outsourcing ‘Revolution’: Neoliberal Governmentality, Financial Capital, Social Media, and the Privatization of the Speech.