Lenora Hanson

Assistant Professor of English

Education

Ph.D., English (minor: Italian), University of Wisconsin-Madison; M.A., English, University of  Nebraska-Lincoln; B.A., English, University of Montevallo

Areas of Research/Interest

British and Italian Romantic poetry and prose; eighteenth and nineteenth-century life science and political economy; rhetoric and translation; materialism

Fellowships/Honors

Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2016-2017

Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, 2011-2015

Foreign Area and Language Studies Fellowship (Italy), 2014

Marie Christine Kohler Fellowship, Wisconsin Institute of Discovery, 2015-2016

Executive Council of the Modern Language Association, 2016

Publications

  • "'Forms of Living Death': Mockery, Marronage and Sovereignty in Percy Shelley and John Gareth Stedman." Essays in Romanticism, 2016
  • "Contagious Revolution and Colonial Securitization." Secure Sites. Spec. issue of English Language Notes, 2016.
  • “‘it […] lives by dying’: S.T. Coleridge’s Mechanical Life and Colonial Necropolitics.” Artful Designs: Automata and Hidden Machinery of Global Romanticism. Ed. Christopher Clason and Michael Demson. Bucknell University Press (forthcoming).
  • "The University Must be Defended! Safe Spaces, Campus Policing and University-Driven Gentrification." with Bennett Carpenter and Laura Goldblatt. In/Security. Spec. issue of English Language Notes, 2016.
  • Scholexodus: Learning Within/Against/Beyond the Institution?" with Bennett Carpenter, Laura Goldblatt, Mike Strayer, Karim Wissa, and Andrew Yale. Cultural Logic: an electronic journal of Marix.
  • "A Feces on the Philosophy of History! A Manifesto of the MLA Subconference," with Bennett Carpenter, Laura Goldblatt, Anna Vitale, Karim Wissa, and Andrew Yale. Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition and Culture. 2014.
  • “Allégorie des multitudes: ou William Blake comme économe défaillant." Allegory of the Multitudes; or, William Blake as Failed Housekeeper.) Trans. Anne Querrien. Multitudes, 2014.
  • "Romantisme et multitudes: Politique du langage." (Romanticism and Multitudes: The Politics of Language. An Interview with Michael Hardt and Saree Makdisi.) with Frederic Neyrat. Trans. Frederic Neyrat. Multitudes, 2014.
  • "Can Biopolitics be Thought Plastically? Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Plant Life, and Political Resistance." Theory @ Buffalo. Special Issue: Plastique: The Dynamics of Catherine Malabou. 2012.

Bio

Lenora Hanson is an Assistant Professor of English at New York University. Her work looks to figurative language as it structured Romantic-era concepts of life and, in the process, blurred boundaries between bodies, species, and populations. In particular, she is interested in how scientific and economic discourses operated through the language of poetry, relying on tropes of substitution and exchange, animation and deanimation, totality and parts to posit claims about biological life and reproduction. Her current research focuses on how such language was used—in both literary and non-literary texts—to distinguish political revolutions from political disruptions (such as riots, rebellions, sabotage, etc.) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how such distinctions turned on an association of the latter with the nonhuman and the mechanical. This project puts Romanticism into direct conversation with contemporary political theory and its attention to surplus populations, primitive accumulation, political agency, and competing notions of materialism.