Joshua Imken

Joshua Imken is a PhD student in English at The University of Kansas, where he teaches First Year Writing courses. His primary research focus is on the utopian imagination as a critical practice and how different works of popular culture foster utopian desire. He is particularly interested in how different mediums and genres both restrain and allow for unique articulations of utopian desire as well as how commercial practices structure utopian desire in ways that often reveal their own inability to fulfill that desire. He has previously explored the nature of utopian in the superhero genre, advertisements, the Anthropocene, and the insect imaginary.