Tyler Curtain

Tyler Curtain (b. July 13, 1966) is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is an influential theorist of evolution, Human sexual behavior, and cybernetics. His work within sexuality studies has been cited by the New York Times, most recently in regard to his reflections on US presidential politics and the Monica Lewinsky affair. Current work includes a book forthcoming from Duke University Press, Mistaken Evolution, on identity, sexuality, and philosophies of biology and evolution. His next project is entitled Imagining Extinctions, a treatise on the philosophy, science, and cultural theoretical import of the extinction of humans.

Curtain was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States, and raised in Colorado. Educated in Computer Science in the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Curtain took the Ph.D. in English and American Literature at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Curtain's dissertation was directed by noted philosophers of literature, history, and culture, Mary Poovey and Jonathan Goldberg. In addition to being Associate Professor at UNC Chapel Hill, Curtain is Associate Fellow in the Gender Institute, London School of Economics, and Senior Scholar, Humanities Institute of the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University.

Important publications

 * Mistaken Evolution: computers, the post-human, and other anxious objects of biological and cultural reproduction (Duke University Press, forthcoming)
 * "The Symbolics of Presidentialism," with Dana D. Nelson, in Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the Public Interest edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan (ISBN 0-8147-9864-0), 2001
 * Baltimore Portraits (ISBN 0-8223-2368-0), 1999