“Repurposing Queens: Excavating a Black Feminist Eco-ethic in a Time of Ecological Peril,” articulates how Black feminist theories of race, gender, and science critique both conservative and liberal trends in environmentalism and environmental studies. The project is transnational in scope in that it analyzes figures/objects from the United States and...
This dissertation explores the interrelationship between time, labor, and literature during the rise of British industrial capitalism. By tracing a tradition of social criticism from Percy Shelley to William Morris that runs through the Chartist movement, Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, it isolates and explicates a distinctive existential mood, or...
Drawing on archival research and a new attention to literary form, Sion’s Muse argues that the religious poetry of the English Reformation decisively constituted new modes of devotional affect for laypeople. At the beginning of the English Reformation, the psalm translator Miles Coverdale wrote, “Would God that our minstrels had...
This dissertation argues that black women’s literature on black-white multiraciality critiques public debates that celebrate the racially ambiguous multiracial child as the solution to racial conflict. Under this framework, this project investigates the popularization of multiracial identity in late 20th and 21st century United States, United Kingdom, and Jamaica, and...
My dissertation, Geographies of Memory, Trauma, and Pleasure in African American and Caribbean-American Literature examines the geographies of the cane fields, bodies of water, and the back porch to illustrate the speculative ways anti-black violence, intergenerational trauma, pleasure and Black memory co-exist in Black literature. Examining the aforementioned geographies as...
This dissertation argues that British and Ottoman literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are linked and mutually informed in their representations of sovereignty. My study of the poetry, fiction, chronicles and travelogues from these periods demonstrates that both literary traditions respond to the rivalry between the British and Ottoman...
After spending most of her flight back to Ghana writing a letter to her estranged lover, Sissie, Ama Ata Aidoo’s protagonist in Our Sister Killjoy, observes the actions of her fellow passengers and reads the atmosphere onboard the airplane as that of “another human market-place.” Sissie’s statement transports into her...
During the antebellum and post-Reconstruction periods, Black authors were concerned with white antipathy towards the political aspirations of African Americans. For many of these authors, sonic figures of resonance, vibration, and musicality served as the key sensory modalities through which the nexus of American anti-Blackness and civil politics could be...
Abstract This dissertation studies a creative archive composed of poems, novels, performances, and visual art produced after 1990 that increasingly represent the ocean as “one salt water”: a space of relations among Indigenous oceanic peoples, animals, plants, and other beings. In doing so, these texts work to forge solidarities and...
“Entertaining Strangers” reveals how theories and practices of hospitality shaped and were shaped by the early modern print and theater industries. Whereas earlier studies of hospitality and literature have focused on aristocratic patronage, in this dissertation I reveal the vital importance of commercial hospitality as a framework for ethical and...