Plenaries

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto) where she teaches postcolonial literature and theory and poetry. She holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and has taught at Bard, Williams College, City College New York, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 

Her academic research explores how science, medicine, natural history, and other kinds of colonial knowing reshaped literature, culture, economy, and politics. Her first book, Epidemic Empire (University of Chicago Press, 2021) uncovers the history behind the dead metaphor of the “terrorism epidemic,” by looking at documents of public health, policy, immigration law, novels, poems, films, and more.

Ji Eun Lee received her PhD in English from UCLA in 2020 and is currently BK21 Postdoctoral Fellow in the department of English Language and Literature at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, South Korea.Her first book in progress, Walking London: Urban Gaits of the British Novel, reads the rise of the novel alongside the city’s emergence, analyzing the way in which pedestrian gaits are shaped by the urban environment and, in turn, shape the novel’s form. She contributed eco-justice lesson plans on colonial landscapes of Victorian Africa to Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom and is developing an article on this topic. Recently, she also started another project tentatively titled Victorian Humanity in Colonial Korea, which will decenter and relocate Victorian studies in a global context. Her works have been published or are forthcoming in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Studies in the Novel, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, and Victorian Literature and Culture, among others.

M.A. Miller, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of “George Eliot’s Wetland Form” in Nineteenth-Century Literature and “Intimate Matters: Soil and Species Sexualities in James Grainger’s The Sugar Cane,” in Unsettling Sexuality: Eighteenth-Century Queer Horizons, edited by Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson (forthcoming, 2022). Miller’s dissertation, “Gender Unconformities: Becoming-with the Environment in the Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Novel,” is in progress, as is a book tentatively titled “Matters of Intimacy: Soils, Species, and Sexualities of Enclosure.” Their writing can also be found on v21 and The Los Angeles Review of Books

Kyle McAuley is visiting assistant professor of English at Seton Hall University and a Faculty Fellow at the 92nd Street Y. His research focuses on oceanic studies, empire, and race in long-nineteenth-century literature. His book project, The Vanishing Ocean, argues for oceanic spaces’ centrality to a historical understanding of imperial literature and culture. Tracing the fading of the ocean’s representational visibility in Anglophone literature across the long era of high European imperialism, The Vanishing Ocean claims that the ocean’s constructed absence became the paradigmatic condition underlying imperial scientific and cultural modernity, and lives with us today as a crucial conceptual barrier to combating anthropogenic climate change. Excerpts from this project have appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture and The Wordsworth Circle, and are forthcoming from Literature Compass.

Nathan K. Hensley is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, where he works on nineteenth-century British literature, environmental humanities, and the novel. He is the author of Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford, 2016) and coeditor, with Philip Steer, of Ecological Form: System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire (Fordham, 2019). Essay clusters he has coedited have appeared in Modernism/Modernity Print +Victorian Literature and Culture, and elsewhere; his own writing has appeared in Victorian Studies, Novel, the LA Review of Booksand e-flux journal, among other venues. Hensley was born in Fresno, California and now lives in Silver Spring, MarylandHis current work is about systems that are falling apart.

 

More coming soon!

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