Gut Reading: Literature, Environmental Culture, and the Alimentary Body

Gut Reading argues that the category slippage between that which does, or does not, nourish both bodies and minds takes on a particular charge during the eighteenth century’s consumer revolution and the simultaneous medicalization of the digestive process. In this period, tracts on diet, digestion, and the changing relationship between health and agricultural practices proliferated. I develop a theory of body, person, and society as gut-centered—a theory that not only counters Cartesian dualism but also exposes how creative and somatic processes that might seem internal or individual are in fact shaped by complex entanglements with wider human and more-than-human worlds. I argue that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone writers engage with the language and emerging science of digestion to interrogate the often unruly connections between bodies, nourishment, and the environment. Gut Reading contributes to recent cross-disciplinary scholarship in the environmental and health humanities by showing how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print cultures anticipate the twenty-first-century view of bodies as porous and in flux.

Quixotic Afterlives: Romance and Popular Culture, 1752-2022

This book project traces a wide-ranging cultural history of the Quixote—the Ur-bad reader who cannot distinguish between romance and reality. Quixotic Afterlives engages with a diverse archive of eighteenth-century and Romantic texts and more recent adaptations, counter-histories, and reimaginings of the period that are often accused of anachronism. I argue that these criticisms might better be understood as accusations of quixotism, in which creators are charged with misreading the archive. By contrast, I contend that by drawing on archival resources and innovating within archival lacunae, these recent creators intervene in critical conversations about the limits of the archive for telling the stories of subjects — especially queer and Black people — whose lives seem to have evaded the historical record. In doing so, they demonstrate fidelity to historical accuracy while also challenging the mechanisms by which historical accuracy is judged in the first place.