CONTACT

annie.mcc@uci.edu

On Bluesky @anniemcc.bsky.social

ABOUT

Annie McClanahan’s first book, Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and 21st Century Culture , published by Stanford University Press’s Post45 series in 2016, explored the ways that U.S. culture—from novels and poems to photojournalism and horror movies—responded to the collapse of the financialized consumer credit economy in 2008. It won the Best Book Prize from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present and was reviewed by The New Inquiry , boundary 2 , Los Angeles Review of Books , Times Literary Supplement , De Standaard (Belgium), Amerikastudien (Germany), and elsewhere.

Annie’s new book project, Beneath the Wage: Tips, Tasks, and Gigs in the Age of Service Work, forthcoming from Zone Books’ Near Futures Series, takes up the rise of service work by attending to contemporary cultural forms from TV to conceptual art. Uncovering a shadow history that runs from eighteenth-century servants to present-day gig workers, Beneath the Wage argues that seeing capitalism from the perspective of the service economy alters conventional assumptions about how work is waged, regulated, managed, and automated.   If this work has often been treated as a footnote in the history of modern capitalism, Beneath the Wage reveals it as crucial to understanding how most people are employed, paid, and exploited today.  

Annie’s other research projects have considered the rise of microeconomics and methodological individualism, the cultural and intellectual history of stagnation discourse, the relationship between “neoliberalism” and the history of the university, the politics and theory of sexwork, and Marxist-feminism theories of social reproduction.

In addition to her scholarship, Annie is Co-Director of the UC Materialist Institute for Research, Faculty Co-Director for UCI-LIFTED, and the Co-Chair of the Council of UC Faculty Associations.