Profile
Austin Bailey is a Doctoral Lecturer in English at Hunter College. He received his PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center in 2025. From 2020-2024, Austin served as the associate co-coordinator of Lehman College’s Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program. Austin's primary area of interest is nineteenth-century American literature and its intersections with philosophy–in particular, philosophies falling under the broad headers of affect theory, new materialism, pragmatism, process metaphysics, and continental philosophy. Currently, Austin is working on a monograph called American Becomings: Ontology as Critique in the Nineteenth Century, which argues that nineteenth-century American authors across the antebellum and postbellum United States turn to and enact modes of ontological thinking in their writing as a means of contesting, unsettling, and immanently transforming dominant cultural norms and sociopolitical doxa. The project advances the notion that ontology (the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of existence, its parts and their interrelations) constitutes not merely a scholastic and disinterested inquiry into the eternal and transcendent but, rather, a way of thinking about the power of difference and becoming that has distinctive social, historical, and political stakes. American Becomings presents, as well, the first sustained, book-length engagement with the relevance of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s ideas to American literature, effectively charting a prehistory in American literary thought of Bergson and Deleuze’s shared concept of the virtual.
Austin also researches in the field of composition studies, first-year-writing, and alternative assessment practices, especially ungrading, which he frequently discusses with the Hunter community through ACERT (Hunter’s faculty development center). Austin regularly teaches a mix of first-year-writing courses (English 120 and 220) and English 307 (Survey of American Literature), and, on occasion, other courses in the major like English 306 (Literary Theory), English 319 (Nineteenth Century American Women Writers), and English 396 (American Prose from Reconstruction to WWI), among others.
Besides his teaching appointments, Austin chairs the awards committee for the Emerson Society and sits on the Board of Trustees for the Thoreau Society. When it comes to pedagogy, Austin is guided by his deep conviction that what matters most in the classroom are cultures and experiences of authentic learning, which rely on processes of care, mutual affirmation, and trusting students. As a teacher, Austin most values process over product, transformation over transaction, and care-centered teacher-student relations.