Please join us via zoom for Nick Salvo's Doctoral Defense titled Detectives on Drugs: Contamination and Containment in US Crime Fiction.

Committee: 

- Priya Joshi (chair)
- Sue-Im Lee
- Liz Moore
- Dustin Kidd (outside reader; Temple University Sociology Department) 

Abstract: 

In Detectives on Drugs, I trace drug-using detectives through the past hundred years of American detective novels to argue that they are essential to understanding the formal development of the genre, as well as the genre’s inherent thematic and ideological complications, contradictions, and paradoxes. These complications mostly swirl around discourses of contamination and containment. The fictional detective, within these poles, has been long read as a vehicle for fears about societal contamination and fantasies about containing these varied threats. The vexing detective on drugs, I argue, is an ostensible pillar of containment already and always “contaminated,”— a walking contradiction where these fears and fantasies unspool and refigure. In this project, I trace detectives’ contact with narcotics across American subgeneric developments to explore the implications of drug contact. 

Please contact the Department Coordinator, James O'Brien ([click-for-email]), for the meeting link.