The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic
The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic argues for the crucial role played by nineteenth-century texts in forging an understanding of human environmental agency – the capacity of human beings to intervene in ecological systems.
Conceptions of human environmental agency are key to our current understanding – or denial – of the human role in phenomena such as climate change. Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously remarked of the Anthropocene, there is a “question of… human collectivity” that accompanies any discussion of large-scale environmental agency at the level of the human species. Rather than sidestepping this question, this investigation unpacks the history of how certain kinds of natural engineering came to be associated with imperial power, while others – such as the agencies of Scottish Highlanders, Native Americans, and African slaves – were repressed in imperial discourse. Attending to human environmental agency in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and H.G. Wells also means attending to the means by which certain environmental agencies were excluded from, while others came to define, the category of “the human.”
Researcher(s): Siobhan Carroll,
Noah’s Arkive
Julian Yates in collaboration with Jeffrey J. Cohen, Dean of the Humanities, Arizona State University, is embarked on a book titled, Noah’s Arkive: Towards an Ecology of Refuge (under contract to University of Minnesota Press), which examines the way contemporary initiatives to combat the effects of global warming and the emerging genre of Cli(mate) Fi(ction) engage with the story of Noah’s Ark. The book traces the way the elements of the flood story as they have been mediated by medieval and early modern traditions in art, text, and music shape writing and thinking that plot a response to anthropogenic climate change. We contend that the rich medieval and early modern afterlife of the Genesis narrative offers forgotten strands of thought, forgotten elaborations of the story, written from the perspective of Noah’s wife and family, the animals on the ark, and crucially those excluded and so left behind to die, that speak more eloquently and compellingly to the ethical and political burdens of living through the Anthropocene than otherwise routine invocations of the flood story in contemporary culture and science evince. Noah’s Arkive recovers these forgotten strands; charts where and how they resurface; and considers how they might lead us to imagine a more capacious and hospitable discourse of refuge.
If you would like to find out about our recent research trip to a modern-day ark-in-progress in Frostburg MD, you can do so at Noah’s Ark Being Rebuilt.
Researcher(s): Julian Yates,
Digital Intimacy: American Love Stories in the Age of the Internet.
This book charts the effects of digitality on ideas of love and how they are represented in contemporary American and Anglophone fiction. The very concepts of love and intimacy appear to be undergoing radical transformations due to the innovations of the digital age: instant and constant communication, matches made by dating site algorithms, social media that seem to simultaneously increase our sense of connectivity and of solitude. Recent narratives – novels by Jennifer Egan, Chang-Rae Lee, Tao Lin, Gary Shteyngart, Sally Rooney, and Zadie Smith, among others – have begun to register these transformations and to ask if the nature of love indeed is changing in response to new technologies. By looking back to earlier texts that also address the imbrication of technology and love, I argue that despite the fast-paced transformations of technology, enduring, analog ideas of love persist in unlikely forms. Simulation becomes stimulation, for example, and fantasy and projection emerge as structures inherent to the love story, even when it transpires online. Digital Romance suggests that we can understand the current climate in which Internet practices seem to be reshaping love by turning to fiction that exposes the long-standing relation between forms of desire and forms of communication.
Researcher(s): Sarah Wasserman,
ELATE
Anti-Blackness is woven into the fabric of the U.S., and more specifically, in English Education programs. In order to enact social justice, we have to explicitly acknowledge the presence of anti-blackness. The research study explores how Black English Education faculty center Blackness in their courses, to develop a framework to determine how centering Blackness can be the foundation of English Education programs. This shifts from just stating that Black Lives Matter, to action.
Researcher(s): Kisha Porcher,
The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic
The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic argues for the crucial role played by nineteenth-century texts in forging an understanding of human environmental agency – the capacity of human beings to intervene in ecological systems. Conceptions of human environmental agency are key to our current understanding – or denial – of the human role in phenomena such as climate change. Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously remarked of the Anthropocene, there is a “question of… human collectivity” that accompanies any discussion of large-scale environmental agency at the level of the human species. Rather than sidestepping this question, this investigation unpacks the history of how certain kinds of natural engineering came to be associated with imperial power, while others – such as the agencies of Scottish Highlanders, Native Americans, and African slaves – were repressed in imperial discourse. Attending to human environmental agency in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and H.G. Wells also means attending to the means by which certain environmental agencies were excluded from, while others came to define, the category of “the human.”
Researcher(s): Siobhan Carroll,
What is Cold?
Professor Lowell Duckert’s current book project asks a simple question: what is cold? Natural philosophers, explorers, and artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered a variety of responses. Cold was a material substance comprised of “frigorifick atoms”; it was the elemental force behind freezing, or, “conglutination”; it pierced bodies and plugged up its pores; it was a shapeshifter that appeared as icebergs, snowflakes, and sheets; it lived in the “frozen zone” of the upper globe, but it also rode the north wind and spread out across glaciers; it took, prolonged, and gave life; it was intensely pleasurable. At a time in which popular climate studies obsess over the “end” of a planet headed for meltdown, or a world “after” or “without” ice, I believe that the various doings of early modern cold assist in counter-apocalyptic thinking: they ask us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in the thinning cold, but they also urge us to imagine alternate futures focused not on inevitable collapse but on ethical obligation and care.
Researcher(s): Lowell Duckert,
Building Equity-Focused, Research-Based Resources for Educators
The Partnership for Public Education (PPE), in collaboration with the Center for Research Use in Education, is working with UD researchers, including Jill Ewing Flynn, and Delaware educators to translate research into practical tools and resources for teachers. The teams include researchers, two members of the Delaware education community, and digital and research communication specialists. Teams are piloting a resource optimization toolkit developed by the Gates Foundation as part of their Advancing Actionable Knowledge initiative. Flynn is working with Dr. Bill Lewis (UD’s School of Education), Taria Pritchett (Mount Pleasant High School English teacher and Brandywine teacher of the year; UD XEE class of 2012), and Casey Montigney (Shue-Medill Middle School English teacher and member of the Delaware Professional Standards Board; UD XEE class of 2012) to support English teachers’ use of quad text sets to foster a deep understanding of social justice and racial equity. Recognizing a need to more clearly incorporate issues of equity into the curriculum, the team is creating a publicly available website of resources based on the 2017 article describing this approach.
Researcher(s): Jill Flynn,
Collaborator(s): Dr. Jill Flynn, Dr. Bill Lewis, Taria Pritchett, Casey Montigney, UDXEE class of 2021
https://www.cei.udel.edu/ppe/news/Pages/Building-Research-Based-Resources-for-Educators.aspx, https://www.cei.udel.edu/ppe/news/Pages/Building-Research-Based-Resources-for-Educators.aspx
Reverend William Jackson
The Reverend William Jackson was a radical writer, an Anglican clergyman, and a spy for the French revolutionary government at the height of the Reign of Terror. He was arrested while on a spy mission to London and Dublin in April, 1794, was convicted of high treason the following year, and committed suicide at his sentencing hearing. The importance of the Jackson Affair has been noted by Irish historians, but my research shows that its impact was felt much more broadly in the Atlantic world in the 1790s, and has a significant relation to the infamous trials of the London Radicals and to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the United States. It offers us the opportunity to see how print and political discourse was affected by the Pitt ministry’s counter-terror measures in a new way because Jackson (unlike so many others targeted by the British government) actually was a traitor bent on the violent overthrow of his government.
Researcher(s): Matthew Kinservik,
Investigating the experiences of disabled faculty in higher-education settings
Stephanie Kerschbaum, in collaboration with Margaret Price at Spelman College and funded by the CCCC Research Initiative, this project investigates the experiences of disabled faculty in higher-education settings, focusing specifically on the rhetorical event of disability disclosure. We understand disclosure as a multi-layered process constituted through the verbal, visual and temporal interactions of a rhetorical situation, rather than as a one-time, verbal utterance such as “I am disabled.” The way disabled faculty compose themselves and are composed by others is complex, and engages questions that have long occupied scholars with regard to issues of identity and positionality in classrooms and professional exchanges. Despite the apparent obviousness of signs of disability, faculty members must negotiate complex rhetorical positions in which they have to explain – repeatedly and for various purposes and audiences – what their disability means in the workplace, and their students and colleagues will need to learn over time what sorts of gestures and situations may impede this faculty member?s access. Research questions include:
- What linguistic, rhetorical, and interactional choices are involved in a faculty member’s disclosure of disability?
- In what ways are disabilities perceptible – or not perceptible – to others?
- How is disability perceptibility accomplished, avoided and/or negotiated by faculty in various locations?
- How does a richer understanding of disability perceptibility productively impact the professional and social environments of higher education? That is, how might policies and/or professional practices adjust in response to a deeper, broader and more nuanced understanding of disability perceptibility?
Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience
Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience is a path-breaking exhibition that charts objects and imagery related to America’s historical fascination with maps. Created by Martin Brückner, Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Delaware, assisted by Winterthur’s Catharine Dann Roeber, Alana Staiti and Heather Hansen, Common Destinations was displayed in the Winterthur Galleries (April 20, 2013 to January 5, 2014) and is now permanently available online. Presenting over 100 items from the Winterthur collections, the exhibition shows how long before there was a National Geographic magazine or Google Earth, maps were central to the social and commercial activities of Americans. In six sections featuring giant wall maps and tiny pocket globes, hefty folio atlases and fragile map handkerchiefs, the exhibition shows the rise of American maps from rare collectibles to popular object available to American citizens of all backgrounds. Visitors of the online exhibition will see how men used maps at home and abroad; how women and children engaged with maps to foster family ties; and how maps became the social glue that would bind a people of strangers into a community during times of change and development. Emphasizing everyday habits and material culture, each of the exhibition’s section highlights particular map genres and map users, asking the basic question: how would you – based on education, gender, age, and even race – engage with maps in early America?
To view Common Destinations, visit: http://commondestinations.winterthur.org/
Researcher(s): Martin Brückner,
Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing
Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing. Edited with Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt, Eds. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.
With entries on Sensing, Knowing, Making, and Doing, this volume makes clear that regardless of time period or physical media, modeling invokes particular registers of phenomenology and epistemology; as a facsimile of a thing or a process, it inevitably creates ways of sensing, knowing, and operating in the world. The volume points toward larger conceptual debates about the way in which models of the past as well as new digital ones – models within models – profoundly shape the world around us. Contributors include Johanna Drucker, Peter Galison, Lisa Gitelman, Annabel Wharton, and several others.
Researcher(s): Sarah Wasserman, Martin Brückner, Sandy Isenstadt,
Collaborator(s): Johanna Drucker, Peter Galison, Lisa Gitelman, Annabel Wharton, and several others
ThingStor: A Material Culture Database
ThingStor is an interactive digital database designed to find objects in literature and the visual arts. Showcasing over 100 objects, the current prototype connects objects, texts, and images, illustrating how students and scholars can recognize, understand, and ultimately conduct new research on or teach with material objects found in works of fiction or visual art. Conceived and developed by Martin Br?ckner (PI), ThingStor is a work of collaboration between graduate students from the Humanities at the University of Delaware and the DH staff from the University of Delaware Library. The ThingStor Team welcomes your participation, comments, or suggestions! Once you are on our landing page, use the tab “About ThingStor” to learn about our vision. You can participate by using the tab “Suggest an Object” where you will find instructions as well as a submission form.
To view ThingStor, visit: https://sites.udel.edu/thingstor/
Researcher(s): Martin Brückner,
The nature of religious experience as it is embodied in literary texts
?His current research comes in two parts, both of which concern the nature of religious experience as it is embodied in literary texts. My focus is on texts which we as writers create and also texts in which writers attempt to embody or provoke a religious experience. The first book, in progress now, blends together medieval meditative practices used in lectio divina with modern composition and cognitive theory to explore a series of ways in which readers can respond to spiritual texts. Each chapter outlines and explores a different discovery strategy, provides sample models of how to apply the strategy, and concludes with a suggested series of texts that might be fruitfully explored. The second study examines selected texts that teach and explore the mysteries of faith. Some are intended for a wide audience who are in need of basic teaching; some seem intended only for those who are initiated. What is expected of a reader of such texts? How do these texts ?teach?? Do reader expectations and experience differ as you move from genre to genre, from printed text to art and architecture? Readings include medieval interpretations of the Hebrew Bible?s ?Song of Solomon,? the morality play Everyman, the York crucifixion play, Julian of Norwich?s mystical writings, Bunyan?s Pilgrim?s Progress, George Herbert?s The Temple, Donne?s Devotions on Emergent Occasions, and Milton?s Paradise Lost.
Researcher(s): George Miller,
The Colored Conventions Project
Gabrielle Foreman, in collaboration with Sarah Patterson, James Casey ; and many others too numerous to list here. In the decades preceding the Civil War, free and fugitive Blacks gathered in state and national conventions to advocate for justice as Black rights were constricting across the country. ColoredConventions.org recovers and shares information about delegates and associated women whose civic engagement, political organizing and publications have long been forgotten. The Colored Conventions Project, which features graduate students as leaders across its committees, has been covered in the New York Times and was selected as an NEH Digital Humanities grant winner.
To learn more, visit: http://coloredconventions.org/
The Stillmeadow Peace Park project
McKay Jenkins and his Environmental Humanities students are central partners in The Stillmeadow Peace Park project, an environmental justice, reforestation and community restoration project in West Baltimore being conducted in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service; local watershed restoration nonprofits; and the congregation of a local African-American church. With a tree nursery already growing some 1,100 trees; teams of UD volunteers removing invasive species; and Forest Service Hot Shots preparing to drop close to 100 dead ash trees, the ecological restoration project is already well underway. Along with the restoration of a diverse and robust forest ecosystem, the 10-acre Stillmeadow Peace Park will also ultimately include hiking trails; meditation gardens; and performance and outdoor educational spaces for the church and its surrounding community.
Scientists and other researchers are exploring the benefits of forest-based physical, mental, cultural and spiritual health for individuals and households suffering from trauma, such as citizens returning from incarceration, and those who have experienced crime or racial oppression. An overarching goal is to provide new ways for urban communities to think of themselves in relation to natural systems, such as rivers, trees, and biodiversity; to rebuild both cultural and ecological infrastructure; and to expand the way we think about urban ecological and cultural restoration, so that the Stillmeadow project can ultimately serve as models for similar projects in cities across the United States.
Researcher(s): McKay Jenkins,
Collaborator(s): U.S. Forest Service