e.polis Fall 2025
Scholar Profile
Interview with Andrew F. Kincaid
Andrew F. Kincaid, Associate Professor of English & Affiliate in Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Interviewed by Muriel Marseille, M.S. Student, Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Estimated reading time: 27 minutes
This interview with Andrew F. Kincaid, Associate Professor
in English & Affiliate in Urban Studies Programs, was conducted
on February 21, 2025, by Muriel Marseille, MS Student, Urban Studies Programs, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM).
Muriel Marseille: Thank you for participating in this discussion. To begin, could you describe your initial entry into academia and identify the factors that influenced your academic interests and career trajectory?
Andrew F. Kincaid: My academic path began in Dublin, at Trinity College, where I studied English literature. In the late 1980s, we had a visiting professor from Minnesota, Ellen Goodell. She was the first professor to teach a class in Trinity on what is now known as literary theory and cultural studies. Until then, my English education was very traditional. It was canonical. It was the British model, the Oxbridge model, and we read Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and the classics. Everything was the European kind of Western canon, and, looking back, I’m glad that I had it. But it wasn’t enough. This professor, Ellen Goodell, from the Fulbright Scholar program, was the first to introduce questions and concepts that you and I probably use in urban studies all the time now: words like power, discourse, ideology, space, and power.
We were discussing questions like: What is an author? How do you define a text? How can you break up the national canon? How do subcultures and form? That was eye-opening for me, and I experienced it during my final year at Trinity. The professor recommended a new program in the Twin Cities called Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society, also known as the Cultural Studies Program. I applied, was accepted, and wrote a dissertation that focused on literary and critical theory. There were some theorists who were especially influential for me, including Michel Foucault, who wrote on the history of cultural norms, and Jürgen Habermas, who wrote extensively about the public sphere and collective action. I realized that many theorists I admired relied on spatial and architectural models to develop their theories. I became interested in fiction writers and philosophers whose work was rooted in specific cities – Karl Marx in Manchester and London; Walter Benjamin in Berlin and Paris. This led me to think about the relationship between space, ideology, and the criticism I was reading. Not just what does it mean, but where was it written, and when? So, what set me on my academic path was a Fulbright Professor from Minnesota who came to Dublin.
Muriel Marseille: What themes or inspirations or narratives have shaped your work?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I often ask my students, “What’s the one book you wish you had written?” or “Who is a writer you admire?”. One of my favorite writers is Richard Sennett, and his book Flesh and Stone inspired me. It’s about the relationship between bodies and cities; how bodies are regulated and channeled to move through different cities. He examines ancient Rome and the agora. He then looks at London, focusing on the origins of parks and their role as the lungs of a city. And he examines how public squares in Paris expand after the revolution, to discourage, as he says, mass gatherings and to maintain social distancing. And then he looks at multiculturalism and New York.
One of the themes that excites me and is probably key to all my work is how ideas spatialize themselves. If people are discussing Irish nationalism, for example, I ask: What did that mean in terms of space? Where did the leaders live? If there were to be an independent nation, should there be cities? If so, how large? How can postcolonial planning than the history Western, European urban planning? I’m interested in how ideas take physical shape and form. And how intellectual debates (over race, class, and gender) appear in distinct places at specific times.
It is similar to what I tried to discuss four years ago with Beckett in a talk I gave to the UWM Geography Department. I love Beckett as a French existential writer, but then I started to think: Where do his ideas take place? Where are his plays located? What props or signs of locality are there? They take form, of course, in the theater, first and foremost, on a bare stage, where bodies, ideas, and people are stripped down to their most minimum appearance. One unusual thing he did, too, was to write radio plays. I wondered why he would move to a medium with that kind of abstract physicality. It makes sense, though, because he was dealing with hauntings, spirits, ghosts, and trauma. In a way, his ideas made more sense on the radio for a while than in the theater, because the theater was almost too physical for what he was trying to express. So, the connection between media and space is important to me. Media mediates the environment.
Muriel Marseille: I read Beckett twice. I didn’t get it. I remember sitting down for a class discussion, and no one got it, and our professor, John Ireland, did his best to explain it. It played in Chicago at the Goodman Theater. So, I got to see the play, and I still didn’t understand. And then I went back to Paris, and I saw it again in French. And, same thing, because there’s so much stuttering in it, and I didn’t quite get it when I was a kid.
Andrew F. Kincaid: Yeah, I know it is difficult. In some ways, Beckett is very much content with breakdowns (in identity, in memory, in love) and with the ways that language does not work. People often struggle with communication. People play language games. There’s a lot of back-and-forth banter. There are many random things happen in that play that don’t really make sense. There are things in life that don’t make sense – events that appear chaotic, cruel, meaningless. When you see Waiting for Godot on stage, it either makes no sense or a lot of sense. And I think people fall into two categories with Beckett, that they are instinctively drawn to it because they see the world that way – mysterious, odd, sad. And then other people see that the play is incoherent and difficult to interpret, and not emotionally rewarding. I think it speaks to people’s own desires. We all project our own subjectivities onto the world. It’s important to Beckett the meaning is never obvious. People have to bring their own meaning to it, which is a challenge because there are few props and markers of meaning in front of you. that puts a fundamental question on the viewer, which is a lot of responsibility. The reader has to make up the meaning.
Muriel Marseille: Definitely. Let’s examine radio geographies, where Samuel Beckett opens it up, interrogating the idea that voice is an authentic conduit for identity. Can you explain that in further detail?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I was interested in the phenomenological status of the voice. I was interested in what a voice is. The word voice appears in different phrases. We ask our students to find their voice, as if somebody has a true voice, or we talk about the voice of the people, as if people have a collective voice that can be reduced to a common voice. And I got to thinking in that paper, too, about how Irish people are often marked by their accents. People are always going, “Oh, I love an Irish accent.” It’s like our voice becomes a sign of our identity.
We are known for singing, or we are known for talking, or we are known for using bad language and swear words, as well as poetry. So, I think sometimes the idea with voice is that there is something pure in it. It’s why we still have oral defenses in academia.
The word “acoustics” originates from the disciples of Pythagoras, who were known as the akousmati. He used to teach from behind the curtain, because he felt that if his students saw his hand gestures, his body, or his disheveled beard, they might not take him so seriously. It was just a voice that students could only hear. It enters your head in a sort of pure, unmediated form. That’s what I meant: we often like to ask people to find a pure voice, as if a voice is something separate from culture, language, and the person we’re talking to. But voices are always mediated by history, by culture, by the spaces in which they reverberate. Voices can be unique, but always cultural.
There has been a lot of work, probably in urban studies, too, in sound studies: the noises of a city, the music of a city, and the rhythms of a city. Our voices are intertwined with those of many other people, shaped by the way we have learned to pronounce words and the vocabulary we have inherited. We often adjust our voice depending on whom we are talking to. My voice is different in the classroom than it is at home with my family. So, I was less interested in a voice as a voice per se in that talk, and more in the voice as a metaphor for thinking about the authenticity of identity and fragility of our egos. Plato theorizes vision and shadow in the “allegory of the cave,” but he could also have drawn upon speech and echo.
Muriel Marseille: I find that to be very interesting. And let me say, the Irish accent, I think, is looked on in a very positive way.
Andrew F. Kincaid: Yes, it is a positive attribute. That is what I mean, because I like other people’s accents, but many people want me to exaggerate some version of mine.
Voices are important for cities, too, because I think one of the dangerous things about cities, maybe at the moment, is that they are trying to silence voices. We are told not to use bullhorns and engage in protest marches, or we are not allowed to congregate and project our voices loudly. I think this all boils down to: Who gets to speak? Whose voice is essential, and whose isn’t? Who talks and is anybody listening?
Muriel Marseille: That is interesting. How does your work, particularly in relation to Beckett, incorporate narratives on urbanism?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I’m in the English department, and one of the ways I teach writing and literature is by using the context and backdrop of the city and urbanism as a way to understand how the texts emerge (from emergency) from their cultural context. To illustrate this, I am currently teaching modern literary theory to PhD students in English, and we recently covered a section on psychoanalysis, reading Freud. I began by discussing Freud and his connection to Vienna. Freud’s family was initially from a poor Jewish neighborhood in Vienna. And most of his patients were bourgeois, who lived outside the city. So, his office was located on the Ringstrasse, where people from different neighborhoods could visit without having to cross into areas where they felt uncomfortable.
I actually chose an unusual section of Freud to assign to my students in the class. It is from a book titled The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. He talks in one of the chapters about why we forget things. And he always says that there is a reason why we forget. We forget the things we don’t want to remember. In that chapter, he provides many examples, but one of them, from his own life, involves getting lost in the narrow streets of a medieval European city. He goes round and round in circles in those streets, as he wants to avoid someone’s house whom he doesn’t want to see. He gets lost, deliberately, as he doesn’t want to remember certain obligations. And he keeps coming back to the same point, asking himself, “Why did I keep taking that roundabout route?” And, of course, he figures out that he had unconscious motivation.
So, I taught Freud through geography. It’s a disorienting geography, and the unconscious, for him, is an unmapped city, in which one gets lost and can’t find one’s way home. Modern cities are often characterized by being bright, open places, which can’t be interpreted as mysterious or dangerous. That’s one example of how I teach literature and theory in a way that interacts with urbanism.
I do the same with Beckett and Paris (tracing his life there), as well as Joyce and Dublin, which is an easier task, as Joyce meticulously records all the streets. It’s fun to walk the route on Google maps with students in the classroom. I tend to be drawn to writers who write about an urban context and whose work is strongly influenced by urban themes. For example, I love teaching Dickens, which allows me to discuss London, inequality, poverty, and crime. Additionally, the book Native Son by Richard Wright is set in Chicago and explores racial disparities prevalent in the city.
I’m very drawn to writers who confront a problem, but the problem takes material shape in the contours of a city
Muriel Marseille: You are making me remember. Did you know my favorite author, Émile Zola?
Andrew F. Kincaid: And which Zola did you read?
Muriel Marseille: I guess his big work is “Les Rougon-Macquart”, it’s 14 books. It’s about two families from the South who come to Paris to start their lives. People often ask me, “How did you start with French literature and end up in urban studies?”. It is because of Émile Zola. Émile Zola was writing the backdrop for most of his books during the period when Paris was transitioning from a medieval city to a modern one, from 1857 to around 1871, as the city expanded its boulevards and undertook other related urban development projects.
Andrew F. Kincaid: I’ve taught a course on urbanism and the city, so I am trying to recall which French writers we read. There was a group of writers I taught in one of my urban literature classes, who are associated with a movement (emphasis on move) called Beur Fiction. These novels, written by immigrants from North Africa in Paris, are very graphic, rooted in the tough neighborhoods of Paris – not in the boulevards of Baudelaire, but in the Banlieues and the projects.
Muriel Marseille: Well, I would definitely recommend “L’Assommoir”, that is the Zola book, and that one is really great. That made me fall in love with Zola and 19th-century writing, because he touches on so many themes. So, it is the theme of the working-class rebuilding pairs. However, building pairs for the whole thing, there is definitely a man-woman dynamic at play. The concept of questioning is indeed excellent. I feel like that was my introduction to urban studies.
Andrew F. Kincaid: There is a theorist of the novel genre, called Georg Lukács. He is an Eastern European socialist, who wrote in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. However, he felt that Beckett and all those experimental modernists were distracting and unhelpful for understanding and making sense of social change. Lukacs argued that the goal of literature was to paint a total and complete picture of society. His models are Hugo, Zola, and Dickens, and maybe a couple of earlier writers, like Sir Walter Scott. You read those writers to gain a sense of the totality of experience, the totality of spatial and urban relationships.
Muriel Marseille: Well, I think after you know naturalism and realism, and after you get more into the 20th century writers, you understand they wanted to reject all of the grandiosity of 19th century literature.
Andrew F. Kincaid: I do love those big books. I love getting lost in their world. However, part of me enjoys delving into the world of surrealism and mystery, where nobody is pretending, they are trying to accurately represent the world.
Muriel Marseille: I definitely remember reading Albert Camus. I understand why he’s important, but he’s not my favorite.
Andrew F. Kincaid: What drew you to French? What made you become a French major?
Muriel Marseille: It was the oddest thing on the planet. I attended the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, where I was taking a full course load. And by the second week of classes, I think I told myself that I needed to take one fun class. And because I have always enjoyed my French classes, I took a French grammar class for fun, and I did well in it, so then I decided to take the next one. We were reading Jean-Paul Sartre, and when it came to my part, I stood up and acted it out. My professor loved it so much that she recommended I spend a year studying abroad in Paris. I did, and that changed my life.
Andrew F. Kincaid: There is a long history of Americans going to Paris, from Hemingway to Baldwin.
Muriel Marseille: I absolutely loved it. I still feel like Paris is my second home, maybe my spiritual first home. I appreciate the emotional rawness of the people. If they are angry, they will tell you so. Yes, I loved everything about French life; I liked it entirely, and my whole personality just melted into French culture.
Andrew F. Kincaid: That’s lovely to hear. I haven’t been there in a while, but years ago, I had a pleasant trip with my mom and a couple of people to rural France. And I know rural France can be quite conservative and a bit boring, but it was truly beautiful. I mean, I just loved the small towns. And I was in Toulouse a few years ago. I loved the second-tier cities; they are not quite as busy as Paris. Places like Toulouse, Rennes, and Brest are all lovely.
Muriel Marseille: I loved Lyon, it was like a dream. So, were you able to get Beckett’s work broadcast on the radio? And what is the future of that particular project? Do you have a podcast in mind?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I didn’t present or work on producing a Beckett play for radio. I moved on from that project, but I’m still currently teaching Beckett’s novels in my current class literary theory class. I developed a deep affection for writing about cities, but I also had the freedom to explore Beckett as a writer, which led me to Paris and prompted me to consider the spatial dynamics of his work. However, my work took a sharp turn towards the ocean and maritime literature and port cities (New York, Dublin London, Hamburg). One thing I am not entirely sure about is when I became interested in the concept of ships and voyages and maritime literature. I think I’ve always been drawn to the horizon.I became interested in the concept of ships at sea as an experimental space, where different characters could be brought together in a confined environment and then pushed out from land to see how they coped.
So, I became interested in Melville and the Odyssey, and I started to think about ships and the ocean as a paradoxical space, where strange things happen. There are monsters beneath that people are afraid of, but they also face very material problems, such as trying to steer the boat. There are very hierarchical relationships on a boat, from a captain down to the sailor, so it is very rigid and structured. At the same time, there is always a kind of threat of mutiny and revolution on a ship.
My work explores the same theoretical concerns about paradoxes and contradictions at the heart of people and culture. Instead of trying to find them in cities, I have started to investigate them in oceanic settings. I have an essay which is about Māori (New Zealand) conceptions of the ocean versus Western conceptions of the ocean.
Muriel Marseille: It is interesting. I was looking at your article “Sailing Worstward: Samuel Beckett’s Maritime Inheritance” and I am going to quote you in these few sentences:
“We may not get heroic sailors in Beckett, nor tales of insight and discovery, but the traces of maritime fiction can be seen everywhere. What is repressed always returns. The ocean keeps reappearing in his work because it is emblematic of the tensions inherent in modern life itself. The sea, literally and metaphorically, embodies competing, sometimes irreconcilable, elements of cultural and individual experience: stasis and change, fear and possibility, labor and imagination, and presence and disappearance. As Beckett aims to create a literature of failure, a fiction sailing toward the worst, the sea cannot be held back. The modern world was made from conquering the ocean, and undoing modernity may lie in remaking the sea.”
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Andrew F. Kincaid: Thank you. I think what I was trying to get at there was the idea at the heart of western literature that says space must be explored and characters must be strong and heroic. We tell stories of discoverers and explorers, and yet there are always victims in the hold of ships. For so long, it has been incredibly difficult, and still is, extremely hard to talk about the representation of slavery. But there are writers now taking on the task of representing those horrors in literature, in fiction and poetry. I think one of the significant advances in scholarship over the last few years has been in digital projects, such as identifying ships and attempting to locate the voices of the lost.
Folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, a figure of the Harlem Renaissance, wrote notable books about the last enslaved person to come from Africa aboard the Clotilda. I taught the book last semester. It is fantastic. One ship opened up the whole course. History condensed into that one symbol.
The sea represents an epistemological problem: how can you narrate it? Yes, it is so big that it is always in motion. Actually, there are more people who have been on the moon than at the bottom of the ocean.
We need to shift our perspective from thinking of big oceans as empty spaces to travel across to focusing on local seas, bays, and inlets. A famous phrase in maritime studies is “the sea is history.” We tend to think of the ocean as a kind of blank space. However, one of the significant themes in African American Maritime Studies is the discovery of all the bones that lie at the bottom of the ocean. It’s like a highway of ruins. The seas are not empty waters. Our history was shaped at sea, and through the labor of others, driven by capital and conquest, as well as curiosity and adventure. I am now interested in discovering local stories at sea that may have a distinct ecology or a unique perspective on the ocean, not as a resource, but as a living entity that needs to be protected, respected, and listened to.
I think one of the reasons writers, from Homer through Melville to Hemingway and science fiction, keep returning to the sea is that it represents mystery, and it’s endlessly intriguing. We don’t know what we will find in it. It’s an uncanny and mysterious space. We go into cities, and we always find new stories in cities, of course. And cities are kind of like oceans. They are often described as wild, unknowable places that need to be modernized and navigated. And in a way, a detective is kind of like a sailor, learning how to find his way through.
I am interested in mobile figures, and the idea of a voyage is the most fundamental story. We tend to tell stories of people who go from A to B and back again successfully, or not, (a shipwreck is a major trope in literature), who are strong and have overcome the challenges. But what about all those people who didn’t make the journey? Beckett is interesting because his characters set out on journeys, but they never finish them. And I love that, because what does it mean to finish a journey? It means something’s over and there’s nothing left. There’s nothing left to do.
Muriel Marseille: Very interesting. What are the challenges of teaching just Beckett in Irish literature, and what are the rewards?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I think the challenge, probably, of teaching Beckett is that there doesn’t always appear to be much of a narrative. Yes, it doesn’t really have much of a story. What you are getting is the sort of rambling thoughts of somebody who might be lost, homeless, broken, traumatized. But isn’t that all of us? I think the reward of teaching Beckett is that you get to laugh at yourself, embracing your failures.
Muriel Marseille: And last question. Do you have a dream project?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I do have a dream project. My dream project is to travel from Milwaukee to Dublin by boat and to keep a memoir. That’s my personal project.
There is a book that I read in German a few years ago, titled ‘The Philosophy of the Sea,’ which examines the use of the ocean in philosophy. I am passionate about other languages, including Irish and German. I study German as a hobby. I would love to translate a book from another language.
I’ve been relearning Irish. I aim to incorporate more Irish, Indigenous, and Native culture into my courses.
Muriel Marseille: Interesting. Do you teach Gaelic (Irish Gaelic (Gaeilge) – spoken in Ireland) at the center?
Andrew F. Kincaid: I employ people who do! And we teach about 40 people Irish Gaelic every year at UWM. It’s fantastic that we get to teach Irish in Milwaukee. We are one of a handful of colleges that teaches it. It’s been going for over 30 years.
Muriel Marseille: I find that to be really interesting because Ireland is an island.
Andrew F. Kincaid: Another dream project is to delve more into Gaelic geographical and spatial terminology.
Muriel Marseille: I’ve been reflecting on the maritime themes and how interesting it would be to conduct research in coastal or fishing communities. I attended a wedding in Connecticut, where I met relatives from New Hampshire who were fishermen. Their way of speaking, accents, and mannerisms were completely new to me and sometimes hard to understand. Coming from the same small coastal place, they embodied a distinct local culture, which made me curious about how such environments shape identity and community life.
Andrew F. Kincaid: What really intrigues me in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland is that you can still hear French, Scots, and Irish accents – some communities sound as if they come straight from rural Ireland. And when I hear these accents, I think it’s incredible how they’ve survived.
I’m very interested in islands and close-knit communities, as they often resemble almost anarchic spaces, places that exist outside centralized control. Fishing communities are quite self-sufficient and industrialized. That’s what I mean by your question about reimagining the seas – we’re going to have to find some other ways of extracting protein from the oceans, because it’s so unsustainable at the moment. We need what they offer, but we have to do it differently.
Muriel Marseille: Definitely, so many problems.
Andrew F. Kincaid: However, there are hopeful signs. And I think the main thing that inspires me is young people. I attend music events and concerts, and I see our students. I believe the next generation will be able to make a difference. I really hope so.
I had a class last semester that was just fantastic. Everybody read, everybody questioned. It was incredibly uplifting. And I think people were hungry to put away their phones and read a book. I was quite surprised, but people really enjoyed reading poetry. They loved coming to class. And I didn’t allow computers or phones in some of our sessions and students appreciated that.
Muriel Marseille: So, it might be because you are a great teacher.
Andrew F. Kincaid: I don’t think that’s true, but thank you! I have a very, very nice job. I love it. And literature is nice because, obviously, it is a lovely bridge between the imagination and the real. It is a beautiful space to land in, because you can be dreamy, and at the same time, you can do social studies research.
Muriel Marseille: It was terrific to discuss literature with someone who gets it; it just warms my heart. It’s been a long time since I last discussed books. So, this was great. Thank you!