The stories in this project, and the story of this project, are intimately invested in creating and exploring spectral enmeshments that are poly-chronic, wonder-oriented and always more than human. The narratives I work with—found in the writings of Walter Map, Gerald of Wales, and Gervase of...
Contemporary Latinx speculative fiction—stories of monsters, time travel, and the otherworldly, among other things—conquered the academy, the literary market, and popular culture beginning in the 1990s. Scholarly criticism typically argues that reimaginations of conquest, colonialism, and racial...
This dissertation examines the way in which literary fiction may enable individuals to transcend tribe-centered biases by fostering empathetic understanding. It draws from a wealth of neuroscience research to explore how such fiction, through the creation of emotionally resonant characters,...
Anglophone, Protestant literary traditions figure heavily in the historicization of the novel and the central role privacy plays in the narrativization of concealment. Protestantism’s focus on piety through individual self-reflection has been credited as the catalyst for the nineteenth-century...
This paper examines the ways in which cripqueer identities are portrayed in South Korean films, specifically in the sageuk (Korean historical drama) genre. Korea’s long history of humiliation and subordination to foreign forces – most notably the Japanese annexation (1910-1945) – and Confucian...
The purpose of this thesis is to explore what we can learn about human life through the relationship of human and nature in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. This paper’s analysis is grounded in the theoretical framework of entanglement theory...
"A Sick Archive: Reproductive Flesh in American Modernity" traces the revolutionary potentiality of the sick femme in literary and filmic narratives of failure, suffering, and confinement from pre-Civil War U.S. to the present. I use the phrase "reproductive flesh" in this project to both index...
This dissertation contends that the historic events of the eighteenth-century Caribbean directly shaped the rise of the novel. The first chapter considers the conflicting cultural representations of the eighteenth-century pirate in the burgeoning genre of the maritime picaresque. The second...
Felt Spaces investigates marginal communities across a range of spaces and subjectivities that exist beyond the bounds of narratives of normalcy or progress. These communities, among them maquiladora workers on the Juárez-El Paso border, crystal meth users in rural Missouri, homeless men in New...
This dissertation examines the politics of representation in Salman Rushdie’s published works and social media feeds. As a literary celebrity and public intellectual with significant influence over the way in which western media frames discussions about the East, Rushdie’s modes of representation...