Interests & Information
Critical Theory
Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature
Science & Literature
Philosophy & Literature
Cultural Studies
Hire date: 2008
Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University, 2008
M.A., Johns Hopkins University, 2005
B.A., Trinity University, 2001
Office: Greenlaw 532
Matthew Taylor
My research interests are in the interdisciplinary intersections of critical theory (including science and technology studies, philosophy of science, posthumanism, ecocriticism, and race theory) and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Focusing on texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston, my book manuscript, Universes without Selves: Cosmologies of the Non-Human in American Literature, examines heterodox American cosmologies that challenge the utopianism of both past (e.g., mesmerism, transcendentalism, evolutionary historiography) and present (e.g., posthumanism, radical ecocriticism) attempts at fusing self and environment, all of which fantasize not the death of the modern subject but its self-gratifying transformation.