Jillian J. Sayre

about

"danse macabre" by istolethetv

I am an Associate Professor of English 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 via videogames that is part of Teaching Games and Game Studies in the Literature Classroom.

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 through 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 has been disavowed.

My book Mourning 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. I have published 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 American Literature, from colonial and early national women's writings to comprehensive surveys up to 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.

Weird Books, a combined graduate and undergraduate seminar, this course explores "weird" or "broken" books that challenge the way we think about the very terms "book" and "reading." From experimental fiction to art books to comics and beyond, we will be thinking about how "weird" books mark important intersections between literature, fine art, and gaming. Graduate participants read canonical works of book history and develop an understanding of experimentation using the methods of material criticism.

Other recent courses include Environmental Justice in Literature and Theory, Native American Literature, Introduction to English Studies, and From Posthumanism to the Nonhuman in Literature and Theory

contact

"telephone poles receding" by gripped

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

Elements

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