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

Bio

My book The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation (Stanford UP, forthcoming November 2022) locates the historical and present-day enclosure and dispossession of non-capitalist ways of living in the language of rhetoric and figure. In brief, I argue that the figural is a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. I read riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and subsistence living through coincidence with universal history. Rejecting the tendency to treat such survival as always-already resistant or subversive to capitalism and modernity, my book argues instead for a far more ambivalent and entwined relationship between figure and what Karl Marx ironically deemed "so-called primitive accumulation." 

I value and prioritize collaborative and collective writing projects that range from literary studies to my broader interests in higher education, racial capitalism, and alternative ways of organizing study and education. Recently I published a co-authored essay with Laura Goldblatt (UVA) and Bennett Carpenter (LEAD NC) in Social Text on the political economy of professionalization. I am currently at work on a multi-layered pedagogical and scholarly project that focuses on Palestine and Romanticism, along with Mohammed Sakhnini (Khalifa University) and Sarah Copsey-Alsader (University of Exeter). I am also a co-editor of Romantic Circles Reviews.

I have forthcoming publications in Studies in Romanticism and European Romantic Review. Previous work has been published in Romantic Circles, Keats-Shelley Review, Comparative Literature, Multitudes, Essays in Romanticism and Artful Designs: Automata and Hidden Machinery of Global Romanticisms, eds. Christopher Clason and Michael Demson.

At NYU, I have taught courses on "The Literature of Riots," "Lyric Conditions," "Race, Romanticism, and the Life Sciences," and "Abolition and the Hearing of Unheard languages: or, Chatter, Mumble, Stutter, Murmur, Rumor, Gossip" (with Fred Moten).



Fellowships/Honors

Keats-Shelley Association of America/Romantic Circles Anti-Racist Pedagogy Fellow, Summer 2021

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

  • "Unprofessional: Towards a Political Economy of Professionalization." with Bennett Carpenter and Laura Goldblatt. Educational Undergrowth. Special issue of Social T. Ed Julietta Singh and Snaza. (Anticipated Summer 2021).
  • "Romanticism and Dispossed/ing History." Keats -Shelley Journal. "220 years/50 Voices" (Forthcoming Fall 2020).
  • "'Ludicrous Anachronisms': Dreams, Enclosures and Mary Robinson's 'The Maniac.'" Impasse. Special issue of Comparative Literature. Ed. Jan Mieszkowski and Taylor Schey. (Fall 202).
  • "Uprising, or 'a kind of manna'." Romantic Circles Unbound. 20.1 (Summer 2020).
  • “‘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 (2020)
  • "'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.
  • "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.