Jordan Alexander Stein

Jordan Alexander Stein began teaching at Fordham in 2012 and is currently Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Affiliated Faculty in African and African American Studies. His research investigates how aspects of social identities (including race, sexuality, gender, and religion) inflect the material practices associated with literary production (including reading, printing, editing, and archiving). These interests shape his prize-winning co-edited collection, Early African American Print Culture (Penn, 2012), a recent monograph, When Novels Were Books (Harvard, 2020), and a co-taught 2025 summer course in the American Antiquarian Society’s Program in the History of the Book in American Culture on “Sex, Gender, and Print.” Since 2027, he serves as a co-editor of Book History.

Stein is currently researching the history of printing and reading in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Working under the title A History of the Book in Haiti, this research has two aims: first, to create a historical overview of the first decades of print in this region (1764–1820); and, second, to abstract from this history a revisionist theoretical model aimed at directing the scholarly field of book history away from its nationalist orientation and toward a great transnational, postcolonial framework.

In addition to book history and eighteenth-century studies, Stein regularly teaches a range of courses on literary theory, from Marxism and psychoanalysis to poststructuralism to queer theory to Black Studies. His scholarly publications in this area include Avidly Reads Theory (NYU, 2019) and Fantasies of Nina Simone (Duke, 2024). Other creative non-fiction writing has appeared in The American Psychoanalyst, Avidly, The Awl, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Chronicle of Higher Education, LARB, Psyche on Campus, The Rambling, Salon, Saveur, and Slate.

As a member of Fordham’s Comparative Literature faculty, Stein is also (slowly but surely!) at work on a book-length study of the interwar publication of Herman Melville’s novels in French translations during the twentieth century, one installment of which appeared in the 2025 special issue of Leviathan on “Melville’s Queer Afterlives” that he co-edited. This research has been supported with grants from the NEH and the American Philosophical Society. Stein has previously published about Melville’s letters in ELH and LARB and co-authored research with Adam Fales (U Chicago) on the posthumous editing undertaken by Herman’s wife Elizabeth, in Leviathan, in A New Companion to Herman Melville, and on the C19 podcast. He is an affiliate of the Melville Society of America, a former trustee of its Murray Endowment Fund, and an editorial board member of its journal, Leviathan.

In 2021, Stein’s teaching was honored with the Key Contributor Teaching and Mentoring Award from Fordham United Student Government, and in 2026 he received the Distinguished Mentor Award from Fordham’s Comparative Literature Program.