A working-class scholar from the rural Ohio River Valley, Clinton Williamson researches the relationship between resistances to work and communistic poiesis in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. His current book project, Nebulous Figures: A Cultural History of an American Riotocracy, explores how cultural representations of life outside the wage relation during the latter half of the nineteenth century evince a social desire to abolish the form of wage labor itself. In tracing a political economic theorizing from below, this project attends to the ways in which anti-work politics manifest in the assembly of improvisatory commons rooted in a restaging of value. Prior to coming to Rice, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at Boston University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Pennsylvania where he was a recipient of the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching by Graduate Students. His public writing has appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The New Inquiry, Protean, and Truth Out among other venues.