Jeffrey J. Williams

Aged twenty years, Williams left Columbia College without completing his degree and worked at Downstate Correctional Facility as a New York State correction officer. In 1984, he graduated from Stony Brook University with a Bachelor of Arts (English) and gained his PhD (English) in 1990. He worked at Routledge from 1989-1990. == Academic career ==

In 1990, Williams became an Assistant Professor of English at East Carolina University and then joined the University of Missouri in 1998. In 2004, he joined Carnegie Mellon’s English Department as a Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies. Williams conducted over eighty interviews with critics, theorists, and philosophers as a part of The Interview Project. The interviews appeared in a number of journals. Some of the interviews were republished in Critics at Work: Interviews 1993-2003. In 2012, Williams coined the term “Critical University Studies” in print and defined its scope in his essay “Deconstructing Academe: The birth of critical university studies." His critical university studies writing has focused on student debt, academic labor, innovation and inequality, the academic novel, and the politics of tenure. == Selected published works ==