Department of English

My research seeks to use colonial and postcolonial theoretical perspectives to explore the ontological boundaries between the land and the body as they manifest in depictions of resistance (or lack thereof) to state violence in contemporary American literature. Whether it is Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition” in which victims of police violence become flowers or Terrence Hayes’ “past and future assassin” who is “both gym & crow”, or Layli Long Soldier’s “38” where a colonizer’s body is found, his mouth “stuffed with grass,” this conflation of the body and the land has become a persistent feature of American poetry in the last decade. I am interested in the possibilities and the limits of the poetics that enables this conflation.