Cultivating Citizens: Ecology and Nationality in U.S. Immigrant Literature explores how and why American ecosystems became objects of appreciation, intervention, and attachment within immigration literature published during the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century. Fictional and nonfictional stories about US-bound immigrants represented naturalization and nationality as materializing through interactions within human/nonhuman assemblageswhat we...
Literary critics typically oppose chronological and anachronistic historiographical schemes. In paired readings of early modern and contemporary poets, my dissertation, “The Shock of the Old: Periodization, Poetics, and Diachronic Exchange between the Renaissance and the Avant-Garde” investigates a series of poetic texts that defy this opposition. The poetic objects I...
This project examines how early modern writers mobilize race as a vehicle for investigating far-reaching epistemological questions about the limits and parameters of human knowledge. While dominant trends in early modern race studies have focused on racial knowledges or particular identifications or formulations of human difference, I break new ground...
Victorian novels’ characteristic preoccupation with marriage and inheritance has led scholars to view the form as socially conservative in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet contemporary commentators feared what young women might conceive as a result of reading. The key to this dilemma, I argue, is the usual consequence of nineteenth-century marriage...
“Quartering the Wind” explores the unorthodox, unstable, and seditious political values that undermined early modern English arguments for what is “natural” in human governance. I examine texts that expose a politically intricate natural world that serves no single model of orthodox politics. While ecocritical treatments of political analogies drawn from...
Penelopian Figures: Narratives of Work and Resistance in American Literature, 1840-1900” examines literary representations of workers who engage in covert opposition to their circumstances. In chapters on The Lowell Offering textile magazine, Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, Louisa May Alcott’s “How I Went Out to Service” and...
This dissertation argues that mid-nineteenth-century definitions of personhood, citizenship, and nationality were largely constructed through the tropes and narrative structures of sentimental mourning. This argument is developed through examinations of a wide range of materials, including novels and first-person narratives, newspaper and magazine articles, medical and scientific texts related to...
My dissertation argues that certain continuities among U.S. theatre collectives in the 20th and 21st centuries have gone unnoticed largely because the aesthetics and politics of these companies are seemingly so unrelated. These continuities, which connect the 1960s' anarcho-pacifist spectacles of the Living Theatre to the contemporary "community" theatre of...
This dissertation traces the meaning and scope of early modern complaint poetry. I argue that what I understand as a secular "poetics of dissatisfaction" arose to fill the void left when religious auricular confession was no longer an institutionalized practice, and that this mode of literary expression was itself shaped...
>"Surprising Metamorphoses: Transformations of Race in Early American Literatures," analyzes early American literary representations of race within the context of contemporaneous belief systems. Contrasting sharply with subsequent periods, much late eighteenth-century thought conceptualized race as an external, mutable bodily condition that could change over time. Identifying how this thinking informs...