Phillip E. Wegner

Phillip E. Wegner is a professor in the Department of English and the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in English at the University of Florida.

Career Phillip E. Wegner earned his Bachelor of Arts in Honors English, summa cum laude, at California State University, Northridge in 1986. He earned his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University in 1993, where he studied under the preeminent Marxist critic Fredric Jameson. He began working as a professor of English at the University of Florida in 1994 and was appointed the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar Professorship in 2012. From 2009 to 2012 he served as the graduate program coordinator.

Professor Wegner has published five books and numerous articles on utopian fiction, contemporary literature, film, cultural studies, Marxism, and science fiction.

Academic interests Wegner's scholarship is often centered on questions of periodization, particularly in relation to the scholarship of Fredric Jameson, who Wegner has called "the most significant contemporary theorist of periodization." For example, his book Life Between Two Deaths examines the "specific cultural period" of the 1990s, which Wegner argues stretches from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to September 11, 2001.

Wegner has also written extensively about utopia. In his first book, Imaginary Communities, Wegner argues that the history of the utopian genre is "inseparable from a history of modernity in which the works comprising this important genre play such a significant role." In Shockwaves of Possibility, Wegner makes a similar argument about utopia and the genre of science fiction, arguing that "Utopianism is not simply one among a range of possible themes or motifs in modern science fiction... Rather, Utopianism is fundamental to the very narrative dynamic of this vital modern practice." In addition to his academic research on Utopia, Wegner served as president of the Society for Utopian Studies from 2010 to 2014.