Bill Brown's research focuses on popular literary genres such as science fiction and the Western; on recreational forms such as baseball and kung fu; and on the ways that mass-cultural phenomena from roller coasters to Kodak cameras impress themselves on the literary imagination. He is currently working on the intersection of literary, visual and material cultures, an inquiry that asks how inanimate objects enable human subjects (individually and collectively) to form and transform themselves. Brown teaches on Walt Whitman, "Urban Fiction and American Space, 1880-1910" and on "Modernity and the Sense of Things." Brown is a fellow of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and Coeditor of Critical Inquiry.

Bill Brown  is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, appointed in the Department of English, the Department of Visual Arts, and the College.  He is a principal investigator for The Object Cultures Project within the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, and has been a co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1993.  Hi is also Senior Adviser to the Provost on Arts and Chair of the Provost's Arts Steering Committee.

His books include: Other Things (2015), A Sense of Things (2003), The Material Unconscious (1996).