This dissertation argues that much of the critical imagination of mid-twentieth century liberal thinkers in the United States is best understood as a worldview shaped …
In this dissertation, I argue that the novel was the laboratory in which emerging theories of embodied cognition developed sensible forms for nineteenth-century American audiences. …
This dissertation is a study of how literature, intellectual culture, and spirituality scripted the early encounter between English colonists and the Powhatan people of Tidewater …
This dissertation poses the “essentially shimmering” as a rubric for conceiving how perception and poetry engage materiality in its most evanescent and changeable dispositions. Think …
“Paper Urbanism” explores what I refer to as American literature’s "urban design imagination," as it evolved between the end of the nineteenth century and the …
This thesis follows the development of Marilynne Robinson's ecotheology across her four novels. Robinson's theologically-grounded engagement with the environment is not simply marginal or incidental …
"Ugly Americanism" examines the intersection of aesthetic theory and early-twentieth-century literature, tracking how American authors and artists engaged the idea of ugliness in their work. …
In this study, I explore listening’s relationship to reading and its inflection through the materiality of the silent page. More specifically, I aim to understand …
“Race After Identity” examines multi-ethnic literary interventions into discourses of racial difference and politics of identity formation. Central to this study is the tension between …
Disorder: Giving Form to Feeling in the Late Twentieth Century United States is a work of close formal literary analysis situated in a cultural history …
My dissertation examines the relationship between aesthetic forms and the governance of life. I argue that the materially reductionist accounts of persons in realist and …
This dissertation examines the prevalence of illness in postnationalist Afro- and Native American novels, and the ways in which such sickly identities offer alternatives to …
My dissertation attends both philosophically and historically to the affect of seriousness in contemporary American culture. It focuses specifically on expressions and performances of seriousness, …
“Between Law and Justice” considers how American literature after WWII responded to political and philosophical debates about the interrelation of law, conscience, and democracy. From …
This dissertation examines sentimentalism, the body, and time in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American fiction, focusing in particular on the work of Charles Brockden Brown, …
This dissertation aims to explain the emergence of a set of vital, if unrecognized, realist imperatives in American literature and critical thought at mid-twentieth century. …