Jillian J. Sayre

about

"danse macabre" by istolethetv

I am an Associate Professor of English and Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers University – Camden where I teach early national American literature, literary theory, and popular literary genres. My research focuses on narrative theory, affect, and community in American literatures. My book Mourning the Nation to Come, a comparative study of early national romances in North and South America, was published in 2019 by LSU Press. I have published on translation in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Prairie, the exhausting landscape of West Texas, the necropolitics of nationalism in North and South America, and the messianic national histories in The Book of Mormon (1830) and early LDS writings. I have two recently published essays, one on animal companionality in American frontier narratives in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and another on teaching translation (and resistance to translation) in Native American literature via videogames that is part of Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom.

In July 2023 I accepted the position of Director of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden. As Director of MARCH, I am creating programs to support campus and community scholarship, creative work, and activism related to social and environmental change in the Delaware Valley.

research

"A loom in the Musée du Textile in Cholet, France." by sethoscope

My research interests are varied, but primarily focused at the interstices of narrative, language, affect, and translation theories. I am particularly interested in how these areas help us think about the violence of identification and the quandary of relation, both between and within the human as well as the nonhuman, which for me includes both the world of objects as well as those whose humanity have been disavowed.

My book Mourning the Nation to Come: Creole Nativism in Nineteenth-Century American Literatures (LSU, 2019) focuses on the early national period in American letters, using a comparative method that considers how the historical romance in poetry and prose participated in or responded to the shifting political affiliations in both North and South America. Mourning the Nation to Come has been reviewed in Early American Literature, American Literary History, CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

I have also published work in Early American Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, Papers of the James Fenimore Cooper Society, Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom, Networked Humanities, and Inventing Place: Writing Lone Star Rhetorics.

My research languages are English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French.

teaching

"relation" by Chris Marquardt

I teach courses on literary theory and American Literature, from colonial and early national women's writings to comprehensive surveys inclusive of the twenty-first century. I also teach what I call "affective genres," genres of writing that are defined by a provocative and intimate relation to the reader, such as horror or the fantastic.

From Posthumanism to the Nonhuman in Literature and Theory, a graduate seminar on late twentieth and twenty-first century critical posthumanisms. This course moves through the technological anxieties and liberatory fantasies of early posthumanism to the world-expanding views of animal studies, environmental studies, and thing theory. Students study how contemporary theorists challenge notions of an essential or integral human subject, resist the anthropocentrism of humanist inquiry, and attempt to think the world outside what Sylvia Wynter describes as the overrepresentation of man.

Other recent courses include Environmental Justice in Literature and Theory, Native American Literature, Introduction to English Studies, and Weird Books.

contact

"telephone poles receding" by gripped

jillian [dot] sayre [at] rutgers [dot] edu
/jilliansayre

Elements

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