About
Dissertation
My project brings together a wide range of texts across nineteenth century America--transcendentalist letters and lectures, abolitionist speeches and novels, mid-century slave literature centering on fugitives and maroon communities, and finally local color literature by and for women at the end of the century... I wrangle these otherwise disparate seeming texts together in order to enlarge our sense of who "solitude" was important to in the nineteenth century, how they articulated and negotiated it, and why. Many of the texts I am interested in emphasize degrees of narrative distance and emotional opacity that I suggest constitute a trend in literary representations of minoritarian subjects’ experiences of what I am tentatively dubbing a “green solitude.” According to these writers and thinkers, despite stereotypes of solitaires as "anti-social", solitude is not really about achieving a certain distance from or socially rejecting other humans. In these cases, solitude signals a differently social re-attunement to a density of non-human lifeforms and perspectives. Green solitude insists on a radical rethinking and rewriting of who counts as a social subject—what makes someone personable, a person, human. To choose such solitude over inclusion necessarily exposes the inadequacy of social structures that, by way of racist, sexist, and heteronormative logics, designate certain subjects as appropriately social and others as antisocial. For characters and narrators who reject sentimental appeals to universal feeling, relatability, and sympathy, what posthuman modes of being, feeling, and narrating open up? How do these modes expose the limitations of inclusion, and to what ends do they opt for social rejection instead?
Current Research Interests
- 19th century-21st century American literature
- New materialisms (transcorporeality, animacies, vibrant/vital matter)
- Feminist sciences
- Embodiment(s); how do different bodies inhabit environments, and how do they experience environmental harm differently along axes of gender, race, sexuality, class, and/or ability?
- Queer/"bad" environmental affects
- Labor histories and the environmental movement
- Pace and scale of different forms of harm
- Toxification and "toxic" bodies
- Ecocriticism
- Ecofeminism
- Posthumanism(s) and/or critical humanism
Othe Committments
Co-coordinator, Critical Conversations
Editorial Assistant, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
