My research looks at contemporary novels, the environmental humanities, and social movements to explore how the structures of contemporary novels represent the changing infrastructures of a world undergoing climate change. I use infrastructure broadly to mean the structures undergirding and facilitating daily life, and I understand social movements aimed at fighting for environmental and social justice to be struggling to make inequitable infrastructures into equitable ones. My research takes inspiration from the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline construction, in which activists blockaded the construction of inequitable infrastructure through the creation of protest camps which recreated the infrastructures necessary for daily life equitably.

Monograph Haunted by Growth: Environmental Protest and the Contemporary Novel

I am currently working on a monograph about environmental protests, infrastructure, and contemporary novels. I begin with the observation that although environmental pollution is commonly associated with industrial production, the US economy has largely shifted to circulation and service economies. This shift sees the relocation of work and consumption from factories to pipelines, warehouses and roads, and it is in these places where the most visible and effective environmental protest is happening. I then look to the contemporary novel, and particularly the literary genre turn of the late 20th/early 21st century to argue first that genre is the novel’s representation of an economic emphasis on circulation, and secondly that the visible and effective protests against such infrastructure are visible in the increasingly self-conscious use of genre characteristics. This research looks at a wide corpus of 21st century Anglophone novels explicitly representing protests against ongoing environmental devastation and climate catastrophe like Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift, Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, and Joy Williams’ Harrow. This project began as a chapter of my dissertation, and I am now working on it as a stand alone monograph to support an expansive look at novels concerned with the environment.

The theoretical framework of this project begins with Amitav Ghosh’s often-cited invocation in The Great Derangement that there are structural reasons literary realism cannot represent climate change. What would it look like for literary realism to represent climate change? It doesn’t take imagination to wonder how people in the real world are responding to climate change: they are setting up protest camps where pipelines are to be built, kayaking out to ports to prevent ships from leaving, and forming human chains across highways blocking tankers from getting to their destination. My argument, then, is that novels don’t need to represent unbelievable weather events to represent climate change; instead, they formally emulate the facilitation of extractive infrastructures and the protests against that extraction. This means they develop new formal techniques to emphasize unsustainable reliance on energy extraction, or the way that affect is utilized to obscure slow violence in the face of immediate violence. I am also incorporating quantitative methodology in this project by using digital tools to count and analyze how Goodreads reviews of novels in my project understand the use of genre.

An article from this project on Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper and Bertolt Brecht’s estrangement effect is currently out for review. I have presented papers drawn from this project at the American Comparative Literature Association’s conference, the conference for the Association for Study of Arts of the Present, and the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture.

Dissertation: “Occupy, Blockade, Circulate: Narrating Community in 21st Century Crisis Fiction”

I am also currently revising my dissertation into a book manuscript. My dissertation takes infrastructural inequality as a main object of mass movements in the 21st century and examines how the responses of those mass movements have formally been incorporated into contemporary fiction. I examine 3 social movements: Occupy Wall Street, #NoDAPL, and protests against immigration restriction. I identify one main strategy with each movement and discuss how that strategy was meant to counter the inequality being protested by that mass movement. My chapter on Occupy Wall Street identifies the People’s Mic and consensus decision making strategies as a strategic counter to neoliberal atomization; my chapter on the #NoDAPL protests identifies the blockade as a counter to the expropriation of land; my chapter on US Bill 1234567 identifies protests as involving direct countercirculation.

I pair each movement strategy with a narrative characteristic in contemporary fiction. In my chapter on Occupy, I examine the attempts at collective voice undertaken by novels depicting social movements post-Occupy. This chapter examines the way Ben Lerner’s 10:04 and Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers incorporate collective voice differently. In my chapter on the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, I identify narrative occlusion—or disrupted narrative—with strategies of blockading undertaken by the protestors. Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper are read for the ways they use disruption, or what Nell Zink calls “a dubstep novel with a bird in it” to blockade affective meaning in environmental narratives. In the last chapter of my dissertation, I argue that countercirculatory protests have been incorporated into novels about restricted immigration through countering genre characteristics. This chapter looks at Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad to examine how they imitate genre characteristics and then reverse them in a strategic incorporation of this protest strategy. In my expansion of this project, I am also looking at recently published novels concerned with the movement for black lives such as Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere We Don’t Belong (2020) and Raven Leilani’s Luster (2020). Both novels exemplify collective voice, narrative occlusion, and countercirculatory understandings of genre in their representations of the recent iterations of the movement for black lives.

My goal in this project is to better understand contemporary social movements and to take seriously the innovations in contemporary novel form. An article drawn from my chapter on Occupy, Ben Lerner, and Rachel Kushner was published by C21 Literature and can be found here.

Infrastructuralism in First-Year Writing

Inspired by expansive geographical and sociological understandings of infrastructure in conjunction with composition scholarship around issues like labor-based grading and linguistic justice, I am writing an article exploring how infrastructuralism can be a guiding principle towards more just writing classrooms. Looking at practices like collaborative design, peer-assessment, and the long-lineage of metaphors like “the flipped classroom,” I argue that writing classrooms have always been unjust places because of unequal infrastructural access and describe how infrastructuralism can help instructors attend to these inequalities. As part of this research, I have received a grant for participating in research on equitable assessment practices and a grant to research the utility of humanities education in the workplace.