David Greven is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. He specializes in nineteenth-century American literature; cinema, television, and popular culture; psychoanalytic theory, queer theory, and gender studies; and the history of American literary and film criticism.

Greven's book "All the Devils Are Here: American Romanticism and Literary Influence," will be published in 2024 by the University of Virginia Press. Herman Melville’s, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, and James Fenimore Cooper’s uses of Shakespeare and Milton reflect not just an intertextual relationship between American Romanticism and the English tradition but also an ongoing engagement with gender and sexual politics. The book makes a new case for the vitality and importance of literary influence.

Greven's volume on Merchant Ivory's film "Maurice" in the "Queer Film Classics" series is now available from McGill-Queens University Press.

Greven and co-editor Brenda Weber have published "Ryan Murphy's Queer America" (Routledge, 2022). Serving as writer, producer, and director, Murphy's creative output includes limited-run dramas (such as "Dahmer," "Ratched," and "Halston"), procedural dramas (such as "9-1-1"), anthology series (such as "American Crime Story," "American Horror Story," and "American Horror Stories"), and long-running serial narratives (such as "Glee," "Nip/Tuck," and "Pose"). This collection takes up Murphy as auteur and showrunner, considering the gendered and sexual politics of Murphy’s wide body of work. Using an intersectional framework throughout, an impressive list of well-known and emerging scholars engages with Murphy’s diverse output, while also making the case for Murphy’s version of a queer sensibility.

Greven's book "Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory" (Oxford University Press, 2017) argues that Hitchcock films stage a consistent battle between the heterosexual heroine and queer characters.

"Queering the Terminator" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) examines the entire Terminator film franchise as well as the television series spinoff to track a phenomenon Greven terms "the unlikeliness of desire." Greven argues that the Terminator films, despite their manifest content centered in militarism and violence, often speak to queer viewers in resistant ways.

"Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity" (SUNY Press, 2016) focuses on the insidious homophobia in contemporary horror films, beta male comedies, and bromances, with close readings of movies such as "Scream," "Donnie Darko," "25th Hour," Rob Zombie's "Halloween," and "Hostel." "Ghost Faces" was a Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.

Greven's other books include "Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville," which was published in a paperback edition by Routledge in 2016, "Psycho-Sexual: Male Desire in Hitchcock, De Palma, Scorsese, and Friedkin," and "The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender." He has contributed essays to recent critical readers such as "Reality Gendervision," "Millennial Masculinity," "The Last Western" (on HBO's "Deadwood"), and "Reading the Bromance." He is completing a book on Hitchcock called "Intimate Violence: Hitchcock, Sex, and Queer Theory."

He is also the author of "Representations of Femininity in the Cinema: The Woman's Film, Film Noir, and Modern Horror," which considers the recurring theme of female transformation in the woman's film. Transformation occurs on several levels, but most dramatically in terms of the woman's appearance. Greven considers the sexual and political implications of these metamorphoses. This book also makes the case that modern horror works should be read as "concealed woman's films." The book treats a wide range of films from "Now, Voyager," "The Heiress," and "Vertigo," to "Carrie," the "Alien" films, and "The Brave One."

Greven's 2009 book, "Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush" (University of Texas Press), argues that a split between narcissism and masochism informs cinematic masculinity from 1989 to the present. Also published in 2009, Greven's book "Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek" (McFarland) considers the allegorical representation of gay characters in the Trek mythos.

"The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and The Politics of Gender" is the first Freudian study of Hawthorne's work since Frederick Crews' 1966 "The Sins of the Fathers." Through a queer theory lens, Greven reopens the question of Freud's relevance to gender theory and to Hawthorne's work. Greven argues that Hawthorne offers a powerful critique of normative American masculinity.

Greven's first book, "Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), studies the recurrent figure of the emotionally and sexually unavailable male in antebellum American literature. David Leverenz, reviewing the book in the Melville journal Leviathan, writes, "Greven's assertions often have imaginative zest... Greven has written a fine first book: sophisticated, smart, ambitious, intellectually courageous." "American Studies Today" describes the book as "a refreshing and comprehensive study of the representation of gender and gendered relationships by authors such as Irving, Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Stowe, among others."

Greven's essays have been published in journals such as Screen, New Literary History, American Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Hitchcock Annual, American Literary Realism, The Journal of American Culture, Legacy, Postmodern Culture, Cinema Journal, Genders, Jump Cut, Cineaction, Modern Psychoanalysis, Nineteenth Century Studies, The European Journal of American Culture, Refractory, Studies in American Fiction, Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, as well as the critical readers "Melville in Context" (Cambridge University Press), "The Cambridge Companion to Alfred Hitchcock," "The Cambridge Companion to Erotic Literature," "The Palgrave Handbook of the Southern Gothic," "Reality Gendervision" (Duke University Press), "Haunting Realities" (on the Naturalist Gothic), "Reel Food," "Action Chicks," and "Reading Sex and the City."

Greven has co-edited a special issue of The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review on the "Late Hawthorne" (vol.35, Fall 2009). He is on the advisory board for the journals Genders, Poe Studies: Dark Romanticism, and The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, and reads essays and manuscripts for journals such as PMLA, J19, College Literature, ESQ, Early American Literature, Cinema Journal, and Studies in American Literature, and book manuscripts for publishers such as Oxford University Press, Routledge, Northwestern University Press, and The University of Virginia Press.

Greven is a winner of a Phyllis W. Meadow Award for Excellence in Psychoanalytic Writing for his essay "Rereading Narcissism: Freud's Theory of Male Homosexuality and Hawthorne's 'The Gentle Boy,'" published in Modern Psychoanalysis vol. 34(2), 2009.