Nicole Kenley

Dr Nicole Kenley is a lecturer in the English Department at Baylor University. Her areas of scholarly interest are 21st Century detective fiction, contemporary American fiction, gender studies, and the literature of globalization and technology. She is currently at work on her book project, Detecting Globalization, which explores 21st Century detective fiction’s entanglement with globalization to suggest that global crime’s inability to be contained signals a larger crisis underscoring contemporary fiction’s global turn. As globalization and its technologies continue to erode national borders, detective fiction works to contain the ever-changing threats posed by global crime. Detecting Globalization explores these generic attempts at threat containment, bringing American and international authors together to examine the extent to which the genre can mediate the challenges posed by global crime.

This book project represents Dr. Kenley’s ongoing interest in the connection between contemporary crime fiction and globalization, a relationship which she has explored in her articles “Global Crime, Forensic Detective Fiction, and the Continuum of Containment” (Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 46.1) and ““Hackers without Borders: Global Detectives in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy” (Clues 32.2). Her engagement with globalization and crime fiction is also evident in her chapters for the edited collections Crime Uncovered: Antihero (Intellect), Teaching Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction, The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, and Animals in Detective Fiction (Palgrave). She is also the co-editor, with Malcah Effron of The Journal of Popular Culture’s forthcoming special issue on place, space, and the detective narrative, as well as a manuscript reviewer for Crime Fiction Studies. Her scholarship on detective fiction has also appeared in Mississippi Quarterly (65.3) and the inaugural issue of Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction (1.1).

Publications

“Women in World Crime Fiction” in The Cambridge Companion to World Crime Fiction, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Alistair Rolls, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

“Detective Fiction and Digital Technology” in The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Janice Allen, Stewart King, Jesper Gulddal, and Andrew Pepper, eds. London: Routledge, forthcoming.

“‘Investigate their past lives’: Animals and Buddhism in John Burdett’s Bangkok Series” in Animals in Detective Fiction. Ruth Hawthorn and John Miller, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming.

“Temporality and Contemporary Crime in Sue Grafton’s Later Alphabet Series”, Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction, 1.1 (2020).

“Global Crime, Forensic Detective Fiction, and the Continuum of Containment”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 46.1 (2019).

“Teaching American Detective Fiction in the Contemporary Classroom” in Teaching Crime Fiction. Charlotte Beyer, Ed. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.

“Sonchai Jitpleecheep: Globalization, Justice and Karma in John Burdett’s Bangkok Series”, in Crime Uncovered: Antihero. Fiona Peters and Rebecca Gordon Steward, eds. Bristol: Intellect, 2015.

“Hackers without Borders: Global Detectives in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy”, Clues: A Journal of Detection 32.2 (2014): 30-40.

“Hard(ly)boiled: Knight’s Gambit, The Big Sleep, and Faulkner’s Construction of the Popular Masculine Subject”, Mississippi Quarterly 65.3 (2012): 339-66.