Christopher Schmidt

Faculty Fellow

Christopher Schmidt is an Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. He is the author of a critical study, The Poetics of Waste: Queer Excess in Stein, Ashbery, Schuyler, and Goldsmith, and a book of poems, The Next in Line. For the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics, he is researching the relationship between economic waste and liberal sympathy in Lucy Walker’s documentary Waste Land and in contemporary poetries.

Participating Years

2014–2015

After Debt: New Forms of Dependency, Obligation, Risk, and Credit

‘After Debt’ imagines a world beyond debt and pursues it as a research agenda across a broad range of intellectual inquiry. How have economic failures been transformed into personal identities, often dividing those deemed “at risk” from those capable of assuming risk? How might we understand histories of debt within genealogies of the fiscal military nation-state? What alternate meanings of dependency, obligation, risk, and credit have people produced within and against debt regimes, such as those enforced by structural adjustment?