Diana’s research explores the history of ideas about the environment, health, subjectivity, and their many intersections.
She studies literary and cultural texts depicting material relationships between humans and their environments—-from the travelogues of Victorian plant collectors to pandemic novels to films about agriculture at the end of the world. Her work asks how these objects alternately reflect and transform shared assumptions about the phenomena that constitute “nature,” the forces that produce embodied personhood, and the meanings and possibilities of community. Thinking across disciplinary boundaries, she pursues answers to these questions by drawing on both historical writing and contemporary frameworks in ecology, biology, and philosophy.
Her first book-in-progress, The Vanishing Self: Ethics and Vitality in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, presents a posthuman reading of the Victorian-era Bildungsroman.
About my work
Articles, chapters, reviews
“The Fantasy and the Paradox of Entanglement in Contemporary Climate Narratives.” In “Climate Fiction and the Limits of Representation,” ed. Lenka Filipova and Caleb Ferrari. Special issue of Future Humanities (forthcoming).
TBD
“The Politics of Plant Life: Transatlantic Animisms in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 52, no. 4 (forthcoming).
2024
“Feminine Singularity: The Politics of Subjectivity in Nineteenth-Century Literature, by Ronjaunee Chatterjee” (review). Genre, vol. 56, no. 3.
2023
“Race, Vitalism, and the Contingency of Contagion in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.” ELH, vol. 89, no. 3.
2022
“Against ‘Endochronology’: Hormonal Rebellion and Generic Hybridity in Confessions of the Fox.” In Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in Medical and Health Humanities, ed. Arden Hegele and Rishi Goyal. Bloomsbury Press.
2022
“The Science of Starving in Victorian Literature, Medicine, and Political Economy, by Andrew Mangham” (review). Literature and Medicine, vol. 39, no. 1 (Spring 2021): 168-174.
2021
“Opportunities & Precarities of Active Learning Approaches for Graduate Student Instructors.” In Teaching Gradually: Practical Pedagogy and Classroom Strategies for Graduate Students by Graduate Students, ed. Kacie Armstrong, Lauren Genova, John Wyatt Greenlee & Derina Samuel. Stylus.
2021
“Bleak Environmentalism: The Science of Dickens's Weathered Bodies.” In “Victorian Environments,” ed. Allen MacDuffie and Aubrey Plourde. Special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 62, no. 2.
2020
Public Scholarship
A lesson plan for teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes, for the DH project Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom.
The Hidden Narrative
in Middlemarch
An essay that excavates the buried plague narrative in George Eliot’s best-known novel, for Lit Hub.
An open-access resource for higher education instructors interested in practical, innovative, and progressive strategies for teaching research and citation.
Blog posts on topics, texts, and themes connected to the health and medical humanities.