Biography
I earned my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2024 and hold a BA from Wesleyan University. I specialize in Anglo-American literature and art from the late nineteenth century to the present, with a transnational focus on modernism as an expansive artistic movement. My research opens new avenues of inquiry in modernist studies by reframing the concept of aesthetic autonomy, telling a new story about its literary-historical trajectory within modernist fiction, reassessing its philosophical tensions, and arguing for its centrality to the environmental humanities.
I have two book projects in progress. The first, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction, examines how a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernist fiction has made—and today continues to make—the market an aspect of its medium. I develop a new account of how the commitment to aesthetic autonomy gained traction during the fin de siècle and then trace how this commitment continues to manifest within market-exposed fiction across the twentieth century and into our present. Analyzing works as varied as H.G. Wells’s sci-fi novella The Time Machine (1895), Claude McKay’s Afro-diasporic picaresque Banjo (1929), and Jennifer Egan’s sequel novel about the platform economy The Candy House (2022), I show how literary forms deemed contrary to autonomous art can be integral to it. Articles from this project are published or forthcoming in Modernism/modernity and Nonsite. My second project, Host Modernism: Novel Aesthetics and the Metabolic Rift, challenges the environmental humanities’ critique of aesthetic autonomy by excavating the ecological meaning of this autonomy in modernist fiction and its afterlives. For example, I read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) alongside Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) to demonstrate how each asserts a distinct sense of aesthetic autonomy that figures the “metabolic rift”—the misalignment between Earth’s natural equilibria and capitalism’s market-driven social metabolism.
In the English Department, I teach courses that explore how modernist aesthetics intersect with psychology and art history (“Hypnotic Modernism”), ecology and sci-fi (“Climate Fiction, Modernism, and the Future”), the political economy of racism in America (“Black American Fiction”), and critical theories of technology (“Literature vs. AI”). I also teach the Media Aesthetics sequence in the College Core, which explores philosophical and aesthetic debates about media, including prose, poetry, film, photography, and painting from antiquity to the present.
You can read more about my research and teaching on my personal website.
Publications
- “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968,” nonsite, no. 39 (2022), https://nonsite.org/mary-ellen-solt-concretizing-1968/.