Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer distinguished service professor in American culture at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the department of English language and literature, the department of visual arts, and the college.
He also serves on a number of other committees across campus - including the executive committee of the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture - and is the principal investigator for the object cultures project at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT).
He also has a long-standing interest in popular culture, and has written about Toy Story and Westerns, among other facets of American life.
His major theoretical work, however, is on Thing theory, which borrows from Heidegger's object/thing distinction to look at the role of objects that have become manifest in a way that sets them apart from the world in which they exist.
His essay, "The Dark Wood of Postmodernity: Space, Faith, Allegory," which treats religious themes in the work of Marxian cultural theorist Frederic Jameson and in postmodern culture generally, was awarded the Modern Language Association's William Riley Parker Prize in 2005.