James Dutton is a Lecturer in English and Literary Studies at the University of Western Australia, where he began working in 2026. He also taught in Media Studies, English and Creative Writing at the University of New South Wales from 2017 until 2023, before moving to UNSW’s Canberra campus in 2024 to take up a role as Lecturer in English and Media Studies. At UWA, James teaches units in English and cinema studies.

From Maitland, in New South Wales, James completed his PhD in Humanities at the University of New South Wales in 2018. The thesis read Marcel Proust’s novels as prefiguring later movements in poststructuralist philosophy, particularly those made by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. This research was later developed into James’s first book, Proust between Deleuze and Derrida: The Remains of Literature, which was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022.

James’s research is across literary and cultural theory, and he has contributed essays to leading journals in these fields, including Cultural Critique, Paragraph, SubStance, Cultural Politics, Philosophy & Rhetoric and Textual Practice. Recent essays have discussed stupidity, sport, globalization, endings, Hollywood monstrosity, unfinishable novels, and Google’s linguistic symptoms. He has a particular interest in the relations between literature and philosophy, especially their points of fracture.

James is currently working on two projects: the first is a collection titled Quiet Proust, co-edited with Bryan Counter, which takes as its focus the unsung or ‘quiet’ moments in Proust’s work to explore its resistance to representational closure. The other is a book project on words displaced by information technology, reading some contemporary European philosophers’ care for language in a digital age that desires its forgetting.