Research profile

Current research:

Supported by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation, I have recently begun the project Spiteful Literature: An Affective Theory of Precarity, which investigates fictional narratives by Indigenous peoples and Ozark/Appalachian inhabitants. The project analyses the representations and uses of spite in literary texts, and I will construct a theory of the ugly feeling (Ngai 2005) ‘spite’ as an affective literary device in US literature. The project hopefully sheds light on the current political climate in the US by arguing that the literary representations resonate with ongoing real social and cultural concerns, such as the spitefulness of Trump-voters, disenfranchisement of poor communities, and ongoing dispossession and colonization of Native/Indigenous peoples, as well as these groups' literary responses to this precaritization. Thus, the project seeks to challenge received notions of social mobility inherent in the American Creed and shed light on a contemporary (literary and sociopolitical) tendency towards desperate, but understandable, spiteful (self)separatism.

Previous Research:

In my PhD thesis, I explored the intersections of trickster theory, queer theory, narrative studies, and Native American literary and artistic productions. Part theoretical exploration and part aesthetic analysis, the dissertation investigated how a fusion of trickster theory and queer theory offers a potentially fruitful new mode of settler colonial critique and analysis.