Nat Happe (MFA+MA student)
Since starting the Litowitz Creative Writing program in 2022, I have been focused primarily on producing a memoir-in-essays investigating the sometimes painful, sometimes tender, and often surprising relationships we have to violence. I am primarily interested in the stories we tell ourselves about violence, and the barriers that taboo, identity, sexuality, and our own bodies impose on the act of describing. Work from this collection has been supported twice in the past by the Tin House Summer Workshop, and a chapter from this project was recently selected as the winner of the 2024 DISQUIET Prize, which included a full scholarship to attend the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal. Over the last two years, pieces of this project have been featured (or are presently forthcoming) in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, Ninth Letter, and Indiana Review.
Susanna Sacks (PhD 2019)
I work in the English Department (soon, we hope!, to be renamed Literature and Writing) at Howard University, where I have been since 2022. Before moving to Howard, I taught for three years at the College of Wooster, a teaching-intensive institution in Ohio. Working at Wooster accelerated my growth as a teacher and mentor, and deepened my understanding of academic administration. But, after nine years in the Midwest, I was eager to move closer to family on the East Coast. I feel immensely fortunate to have found a position teaching African literature in a department that centers Black Studies and Afrodiasporic Literature.
My work—both scholarly and personal—is invested in understanding how global systems and platforms shape individual lives, and the tools literature gives us to work against (or live within) those systems. Working at Howard has helped me expand my research into the influence of international systems on African literature. My first book, Networked Poetics: The Digital Turn in Poetry from Southern Africa, was released by UMass Press in February 2024. The book tracks how young poets across southern Africa built communities online to sustain their movement work on the ground. When I began the project, I wanted to explore how poetry was used to construct collective identities; as the project developed, I became increasingly interested in how global systems of valuation shape literary form.
Exploring these questions over the past few years has taken my writing in a range of directions: from co-editing special issues on Sound Studies from Africa (with NU CLS PhD Scott Newman) and a cluster on Reading with Algorithms, to articles on protest theatre as historiography (PMLA 138.1) and IGO funding and performance poetry (forthcoming Matthew Kilbane’s volume Expressive Networks). My current book project, tentatively titled A World of Debt: African Literature in the Wake of Structural Adjustment, explores the role of debt in the cultural imaginary in southern Africa. I want to understand what it means that market systems dominate so much of our cultural imagination, how international debt shapes the state’s relationship to its citizens, and what other models literature can offer.
Olivia Xu (PhD student)
While I came to the U.S. (and Northwestern specifically) in 2018 committed to becoming a Victorianist, I am happy to find myself, six years later, with a broader range of interests and perspectives that may strain against the very category of “Victorian Studies.” My dissertation, “Multilingualism of the Other: Writing the Novel in Translation East and West, 1818-1910,” uncovers a translational history of the novel amidst the tectonic shifts of two imperial language regimes in the long nineteenth century: the rise of global English and the decline of classical Chinese. Countering the familiar narrative that the novel form rises in Europe and is subsequently translated elsewhere, my project argues that translation is a prerequisite for the novel to become novelistic. Through an Anglo-Chinese comparative lens, I read novelistic forms such as historical mimesis, frame narratives, free indirect discourse, and heteroglossia as translingual and translational technologies that facilitate the imperial (de)formation of two world language hegemonies. Integrating translation as a form, the English novel legitimizes its national language to operate seamlessly on a global scale as a world-translating language, whereas the Chinese novel has to formally grapple with the waning universality of classical Chinese, once a literary lingua franca of East Asia. An article-length version of one of my chapters, “Lin Shu and Dickens’s Chinese Form,” was solicited for publication in the journal of Victorian Studies. Another essay from this project, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically: Romola and the Historical Novel as Translation,” has been accepted by English Literary History.
I am currently working on an article that grew out of a course I designed and taught for the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures in Spring 2024. In this class, “Reading China in Translation,” we read historical and contemporary theories of translation in relation to R. F. Kuang’s award-winning fantasy novel Babel (2022), which tells a counterfactual history of the nineteenth century when translation makes all the difference in the world, including Britain’s domination of China. Inspired by the incredibly rich discussions we had as a class, I’m developing an article that traces the relationship between England and China from the nineteenth century to the present, which testifies to a tangled history of colonial aggression, inter-imperial collision, Cold War antagonism, and neoliberal cosmopolitanism.