Molly Farrell (panelist) is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University. She specializes in early American literature, the history of demography, and women, gender, and sexuality studies. Her book project, Counting Bodies: Imagining Population in the Early America is currently under review at the University of Pennsylvania Press. She has published articles in various collections and journals, including American Literature, where her essay “Dying Instruction: Puritan Pedagogy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” appeared in June 2010. Her notable essay, “‘Beyond My Skil’: Mary Rowlandson’s Counting,” Early American Literature, 47:1 (February 2012): 59-87, introduces demography to the field of early American literature and analyzes its effect on the culture of reproduction at the time. A leader in the nascent turn towards writing about population, she has presented widely on popular demography, population theory, and statistical writings in early American writing.

 

Abby Goode (presider and panelist) is a Ph.D. Candidate in English and the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, sustainability studies, and transnational American studies. Her dissertation, “Democratic Demographics: A Literary Genealogy of American Sustainability,” traces the development of discourses of sustainability in the literature of the long nineteenth century. It locates agendas of “population improvement” within these discourses and shows how writers imagine sustainability through literary conceptions of the American population. Her essay “Gothic Fertility in Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808)” is forthcoming in Early American Literature. She has presented on a range topics such as eugenics and sustainability, U.S. reproductive politics, early American fertility, sex and comedy, biopolitics, and hemispheric American studies.

 

Holly Schreiber (panelist) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature and American Studies at Indiana University. She specializes in American literary journalism of the twentieth century, social justice, poverty studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies. While writing her dissertation, “Representations of Poverty in American Literary Journalism,” she received numerous fellowships and awards, such as the Ruth Norman Halls Dissertation Year Fellowship, the Lieber Memorial Teaching Associate Award, and the Best Research Paper award from the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies. Her articles, “Cannibalized Evidence: The Problem of Over-incorporation in Zheng Yi’s Scarlet Memorial” and “Journalistic Critique in Stephen Crane’s ‘An Experiment in Misery,’” are forthcoming in the Spring 2014 issues of The Comparatist and Literary Journalism Studies respectively.

 

Stephanie LeMenager (respondent) is Moore Endowed Professor of English at the University of Oregon. Working at the intersection of American Studies and the environmental humanities, she has been instrumental in the recent scholarly turn to sustainability. She is the author of Manifest and Other Destinies (U of Nebraska P, 2005), and, most recently, Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford UP, 2014). Along with co-editing the collection Environmental Humanities for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2012) with Teresa Shewry and Ken Hiltner, she has co-founded the environmental humanities journal Resilience with Stephanie Foote, which engages centrally with questions of sustainability. LeMenager’s notable recent publications include “Nineteenth-Century American Literature without Nature? Rethinking Environmental Criticism,” The Oxford Handbook to Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Oxford UP 2011), “The Aesthetics of Petroleum, After Oil!,” American Literary History 24:1 (January 2012): 59-87, “Fossil, Fuel: Manifesto for the Post-Oil Museum,” Journal of American Studies 46 (Spring 2012): 375-394, and “The Sustainable Humanities,” co-authored with Stephanie Foote, PMLA 127.3 (May 2012): 572-578. She is currently at work on a book called Weathering that focuses on the ecological value of writing in the era of climate collapse.