Publications
Book in Progress
Entangled Lives: Multispecies Selves, Justice, and Narratives
Edited Volumes
Co-editor with Danielle Celermajer, “Multispecies Justice and Narrative,” the minnesota review, forthcoming.
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Ho’ailona: Homelessness, Extinction, and Conservation in Hawai’i,” Environmental Humanities, forthcoming.
This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species “homeless.” By telling situated stories about the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared “homeless” and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009 by marine conservationists, I argue that the language of “home” points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in western conservation. Reading the discourse of “homelessness,” I contend, offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, I consider how Kānaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to “home” that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, I examine how discourses of “home” are strategically produced by marine conservation and its colonialist logics. Ho‘ailona’s experiences illustrate how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to “home” and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.
“Economies of Extinction: Animals, Labor, and Inheritance in the Longleaf Pine Forests of the U.S. South,” Animal Studies Journal (special issue on “Critical Animal Studies in an Age of Extinction”), vol. 12, no. 2, 2023, 14-40.
Despite mounting critiques, extinction continues to be framed as a unidirectional problem where humans, through acts of negligence and intent, lead nonhuman species to their demise. In addition to universalizing the actors and processes involved, unidirectional approaches overlook the ways nonhuman beings participate in the extinction of others and the ways extinction continues to impact multispecies communities long after the violent event or the death of an endling. With its focus on how nonhuman animals experience and navigate violence, the field of critical animal studies can illustrate how nonhuman animals contribute to extinction events and how extinction unfolds across distinct groups over extended temporal periods. Placing critical animal studies in conversation with species loss, this article takes up the longleaf pine forests of the U.S. South, an ecological community that was once among the largest in the world and is now among the most endangered. I consider how late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century naval stores and logging operations used animal labor and the logics of animality to extract longleaf pine and its products. Animal-dependent industries like turpentining and logging, I argue, were part of what John Levi Barnard calls an “extinction-producing economy.” Looking at the labor of oxen, mules, and horses, together with the Black and immigrant laborers tasked with providing their care, I ask how animals and their human caretakers become caught up in the wider deaths of others. Acknowledging that the absences resulting from species loss extend beyond the historical events and timeframes that produced them, I then examine how subsequent generations of humans and nonhumans have inherited the loss of longleaf forests. Turning to Janisse Ray’s memoirs Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and Wild Card Quilt: The Ecology of Home, I consider her family’s involvement in eradicating longleaf forests and how this loss continues to be experienced.
“Habituated Knowledges: The Entanglements of Science, Species, and Selfhood,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 38, no. 1, 2023, 355-83. First online on 18 October 2022.
*Received the 2023 Schachterle Essay Prize from the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts for the best new essay on literature and science written in English by a nontenured scholar.
Examining personal narratives written by field primatologists, this article argues that habituation — the process of accustoming a wild animal to the researcher’s presence — produces “habituated knowledges.” These knowledges and knowledge-making practices recognize other species as co-participants in knowledge production and rewrite the boundaries of the researcher’s self to include nonhuman study subjects.
“Barbadian Biocontact Zones and Threatened English Colonialism: Reading the Unruly Species of Richard Ligon’s History,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 28, no. 2, 2021, 436-61.
This article argues that Richard Ligon, in his True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (1657), uses the promotional genre to discursively fashion control of Barbados and lay authoritative claim to ecologies that otherwise frustrate English possessive practices. However, despite Ligon’s rhetorical attempts to portray colonial success on the island of Barbados, the disruptive presence and actions of unruly nonhumans in his text suggest that Ligon and his English contemporaries held only a tenuous foothold on the island and that European colonists expressed significant anxieties about the colonial endeavor. Ligon’s History, in other words, demonstrates that while colonialism presents itself as confident and self-assured in its capacity to dominate and destroy, this violent process is, in fact, deeply fraught, precarious, and uncertain. By studying the unruly rats, withes, cockroaches, and chigoes that populate Ligon’s text, we can better understand how colonialism is a project made vulnerable by ecological actors and how colonial discourse is a product of the tensions that emerge through encounters with nonhuman others.
“Uncomfortable Encounters: Cockroach Narratives, Selfhood, and Togetherness,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 8, no. 2, 2020, 88-102.
This article studies literary depictions of uncomfortable encounters with cockroaches in two contemporary multispecies memoirs: Hugh Raffles’s Insectopedia (2010) and Richard Schweid’s The Cockroach Papers: A Compendium of History and Lore (1999). I argue that the unsettling encounters storied in multispecies memoirs facilitate moments of unknowing as both species seek to understand the disturbing other, asking people to reimagine the multispecies entanglements in which we all participate. Reading discomfort as an affective mode reveals the various ways cross-species alterity breaks down during encounters with other species, and it opens space for interspecies flourishing. Discomfort accomplishes this work, I argue, by redrawing the boundaries of the self. Uncomfortable encounters open the self to the worlds and perspectives of other species, blurring the boundaries that separate self from other.
“When Things Hail: The Material Encounter in Anthropocene Literature,” Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture, vol. 28, no. 3, 2020, 285-307.
This essay argues that material things hail individuals on an everyday basis, pulling people into a more lateral set of relations with materiality. To make this argument, I read several twentieth-century critics and philosophers who have theorized the address, including Althusser, Levinas, and Butler, alongside two anthropocene narratives that center material stratification and the viscous hauntings of things. As the encounters in Ann Pancake’s novel Strange as This Weather Has Been (2007) and Chris Chester’s memoir Providence of a Sparrow (2002) reveal, the momentary relationship with things precipitated by the hail refigures the human participant as one agent among many.
“Energy Anxiety and Fossil Fuel Modernity in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds,” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 43, no. 2, 2020, 118-33.
In recent years, critics have pointed out that fossil fuels enabled the development of modernist cultural productions and sensibilities, and yet those fuels remain largely invisible within the art and literature of the period. The energy humanities, a critical orientation that examines the infrastructures and subjectivities of modernity that arose through energy extraction and consumption, offers an entrepôt into thinking fossil fuels and other energy forms in modernist texts. The War of the Worlds presents several ways to begin thinking energy and the development of fossil fuel modernity in modernist literature. More specifically, reading energy in Wells’s novel reveals the social anxieties of fossil fuel overconsumption during the late nineteenth century. Acknowledging the instability of contemporary energy systems, Wells’s The War of the Worlds imagines the collapse of fossil fuel modernity and explores alternate forms of energy.
“Indigenous Radical Resurgence and Multispecies Landscapes: Leslie Marmon Silko’s The Turquoise Ledge,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 31, no. 3-4, 2019, 135-57.
This essay demonstrates that by supporting nonhuman well-being, Laguna Pueblo author Leslie Marmon Silko — in her memoir The Turquoise Ledge — refuses settler-colonial possession and displacement and creates a flourishing multispecies landscape. Contributing to the history of Indigenous life writing that uses personal narratives to resist the violence of colonization, The Turquoise Ledge anticipates a form of what Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson terms “radical resurgence” in order to disrupt the physical and ideological tools of settler colonialism that attempt to claim, control, and eventually eradicate certain human and nonhuman bodies. Caught in a web of precarious but enduring entanglements, Silko and these beings craft alternative modes of togetherness to resist contemporary settler-colonial violence.
“The Fire Ants of Hurricane Harvey: Displacement and Belonging in Houston,” Otherness: Essays and Studies (special issue on “Otherness and the Urban”), vol. 7, no. 1, 2019, 169-93.
This article examines news and social media representations of the red fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, that were published during the historic flooding of Houston by Hurricane Harvey in late August 2017. I argue that the narratives produced about the fire ants in popular media perpetuate damaging and inadequate explanations of the species’ role in Houston’s imagined and material cityscape. In order to understand the various media responses to the ants, I provide a naturalcultural history of the fire ant in the southern United States and offer a literary analysis of these media representations. Arguing that the historical and contemporary discourses about S. invicta ignore this creature’s role in socio-material landscapes, I propose two generative models for interpreting and understanding the fire ants in Houston that, when read together, offer a framework for future cohabitation. Revisiting Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the assemblage, I argue that the fire ants caught up in the floodwaters typify a contemporary assemblage associated with risk. I then use Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt’s twin framework of “Ghosts” and “Monsters” to examine the imagined erasure of fire ants from the Houston landscape and the subsequent horror their physical presence evoked. Like a ghost, S. invicta points to our forgetting, and, like a monster, this species forces humans to consider the realities and possibilities of multispecies togetherness. Read alongside one another, the assemblage and Ghosts and Monsters chart a collaborative future of multispecies collectivity that offers ways of thinking and being in the difficult spaces created by contemporary risk society.
“Inscriptive Energetics: Climate Change, Energy, Inscription,” Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, vol. 9, no. 1, March 2019, 45-53. First online on 10 September 2018.
Scholars often observe that climate change is difficult to engage with and theorize. This article proposes that examining climate disruption through the framework of energy offers a way of thinking through, with, and against anthropogenic climate change. As I argue, climate change is an assemblage of shifting energies that includes pressure systems, temperature gradients, and storms. Climate change-as-energy inscribes itself onto material bodies, writing itself into the geologic record, leaving its imprint in plants, and stamping its presence in the flesh of the human and more than human. I call this ability of climate energetics to inscribe earthly bodies inscriptive energetics. The material traces of climate change, or inscriptive energetics, can be read on, in, and through bodies. Writers and artists have considered the inscriptive energetics imprinted upon forms—but implicitly, without identifying their own theorization of climate change as a problem of energy. Lynda Mapes’s Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak is a nodal point through which to explore how climate change itself acts as a form of energy that re-writes the world. Her book becomes a touchstone for a larger theory of inscriptive energetics, which expands out to consider examples of literary, artistic, and scientific discourse. As such, this article makes two primary contributions. First, it introduces the concept of inscriptive energetics, offering a theory of climate change based upon the interrelated study of energy and materiality. Second, it provides a way to conceptualize and understand the material impacts of climate change
“Creating a Barrio in Iowa City, Iowa, 1916-36: Mexican Section Laborers and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company,” The Annals of Iowa, vol. 76, no. 4, 2017, 406-32.
*Received the Mildred Throne – Charles Aldrich Academic History Award for the most significant article on Iowa history published in 2017.
This article explores how the individual interests of Mexican railroad laborers, the corporate interests of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company, and the communal interests of Euro-Americans competed, converged, and compromised to create an early Mexican railroad barrio in Iowa. In particular, it traces the development of the first barrio in Iowa City between 1916 and 1936, examining the processes of “barrioization,” or the formation of a residentially and socially segregated place in response to racial conflict and discrimination, that transformed this neighborhood. I examine how Mexican immigrant struggles over an ideological and physical place intersected with corporate railroad policies and Euro-American communal discrimination in the early twentieth century. By following annual shifts in worker composition and housing, this article traces the ways individuals and their practices of placemaking create history both within and external to dominant systems of power.
Book Chapters
“The Climate of Extinction: Resistant Multispecies Communities in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory,” Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis, edited by Matthias Stephan and Sune Borkfelt, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, 179-99. First online on 22 November 2022.
Resistance to environmental violence is typically understood as a human endeavor. This chapter challenges such a view, arguing that resistance is often a collaborative, multispecies practice that brings together human and nonhuman groups to fight for shared futures. Drawing upon contemporary U.S. literature, the chapter examines the various multispecies communities that emerge at the edge of extinction and climate change in Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and Richard Powers’s The Overstory. In Flight Behavior, scientists, college students, farmers, churchgoers, tourists, British feminists, and climate activists gather around a population of monarch butterflies attempting to overwinter on a Tennessee mountain because their migratory route has been disrupted by severe weather. In The Overstory, radical environmental activists, scientists, and artists come together to resist the logging of ancient redwoods and douglas firs in California and Oregon that contributes to climate change. For these multispecies communities, resistance to extinction and climate change offers a way to preserve the entangled relationships that support human and nonhuman lives. The two novels demonstrate that shared acts of defiance forge more livable worlds for monarchs, redwoods, firs, and their attendant human communities. As such, resistance across species boundaries is a necessary step toward imagining and practicing multispecies justice.
Book Reviews
Review of Animal Resistance in the Global Capitalist Era by Sarat Colling. Journal of Animal Ethics, vol. 13, no. 1, 2023, 93-94.
Review of Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice by Harlan Weaver. Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Technology, and Culture, vol. 30, no. 1, 2022, 105-07.
Review of The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds by Thom van Dooren. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 27, no. 2, 2020, 427-29.
“Rewriting the Urban: Frederick L. Brown’s Animal History of Seattle.” Review of The City is More Than Human: An Animal History of Seattle by Frederick L. Brown, Journal of the West, vol. 58, no. 3, 2019, 75-77.
“Telling Multispecies Stories from the Anthropocene.” Review of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, Humanimalia, vol. 10, no. 1, 2018, 237-41.
Review of Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Western American Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2018, 132-33.
Pedagogy
With Juan Manuel Rubio, “Renewable Energy in the College Classroom: Lessons in Experiential Learning,” Teaching Energy Humanities, edited by Jason Molesky and Debra Rosenthal, Modern Language Association (MLA), forthcoming.
“Teaching Multispecies Relationships: Nonhumans and Knowledge Production in Science Writing,” Teaching with Science Writing in the Humanities Classroom, edited by Lisa Ottum, Allison Dushane, and Ros Powell, Modern Language Association (MLA), forthcoming.
Co-Author, Teaching and Curriculum Guide for Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus, University of Oregon Common Reading Program, 2019.
Public-Facing
With Juan Manuel Rubio, Max Widmann, Alex Norbrook, and Grace Wang, Mining for the Climate, audio documentary, February 2024.
With Lena Schlegel, Shannon Lambert, Hannah Della Bosca, and Blanche Verlie, “Multispecies Grief in the Wake of Megafires,” Edge Effects, 1 June 2023.
“Hawaiian Monk Seals and Homelessness: Extinction Stories for Multispecies Justice,” The Living Archive: Extinction Stories from Oceania, 6 September 2021.
“Fossil Fuel Modernities,” Indiana University Press News Blog, 1 April 2020.