John Heon is co-director of the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Consortium, specializes in the psychology, politics, and aesthetics of humor in modern/postmodern literature and visual art. His essay, “Twisted Witz: Experiments in Psychopathology and Humor by Dr. Faustroll and His ‘Pataphysical Progeny,” will be published in the forthcoming book,
Pataphysics Unrolled, (Penn State UP). He has analyzed the relationship between racial politics and humor in Pynchon’s fiction in “Crossing the Punch-Line” (Peter Lang), and in his dissertation, The Dionysia of Science. His book in progress, Articulate Art: Language, Literature, and Humor in the Works of Bruce Nauman, examines Nauman’s oeuvre in the context of avant-garde black humor and the comic theories of Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, and Wittgenstein. John holds a doctorate in English from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Dean’s Scholar Award. He has also taught at UW-Madison, Marquette University, and in the Education Department of the Phillips Collection.