Dr. Harriet S. Hughes

harriet smith hughes
Post-Award Member
Christ Church College, Oxford
harriet.smithhughes@ell.ox.ac.uk

Thesis Title: 'The Personal Turn: U.S. Nonfiction, 1980-2022'

Supervisor: Prof. Merve Emre

 

Current research

My doctoral thesis passed without corrections in September 2024. In it, I argue that a politics of the 'personal' and associated set of forms have become increasingly prevalent in U.S. nonfiction: notably an entrepreneurial 'I,' marked by narratives of revelation and self-discovery. One of the key features of this 'I,' I suggest, is that it repels critique, crowding out alternative, and deeper historical formulations of the writing subject. I complicate this idea of the 'personal' across four cases studies, each of which both distill and dilate key discourses in C20 and C21 U.S. criticism.

 

These case studies are:

  • Eve Sedgwick's 'virtuosic' first-person, her poetic 'muse,' and their duelling significance in her queer critique of the 1980s and '90s
  • The pronominal grammar of Frank B. Wilderson III's memoir Afropessimism, as compared with the depersonalized and 'fugitive' form of Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's Black Studies manifestoes
  • Claudia Rankine's ambiguous and ambivalent lyric subjects in first her American Lyrics, and then the essayistic Just Us: An American Conversation
  • The apparently 'daring,' hybrid, heretical, and risky personal subject of the modern essay, its neoliberal realities, and the evasions and clichés of essay criticism—as traced in the Best American Essays series, 1986-2022

I am currently preparing a monograph proposal based on my thesis. I am also at work on a second book project, prospectively titled The Promise of Cliché, on the possible political affordances of repetitious forms.

 

Teaching

I have taught widely at Oxford in Anglophone literatures since 1800. My teaching experience includes: full courses in Contemporary Literature and Queer Literature; a specialist seminar on 'Fugitivity and Form'; tutorials across Papers 3 and 4, on authors including Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath, Kazuo Ishiguro, Toni Morrison, and Zadie Smith; and 12 undergraduate dissertations to date.

My teaching specialisms include: queer theory and queer literatures; Black and women of color feminisms; Black Marxisms; post-1945 U.S. literature and nonfiction; nonfiction print histories; the history of the essay; lyric; autobiography; impersonality.

 

I have recently supervised or am currently supervising dissertations on:

  • Virginia Woolf and the poetics of elegy
  • L'écriture féminine and Anaïs Nin's short erotic fiction
  • Frank Ocean and discourses of afro-fabulation
  • Hanya Yanagihara, medieval 'passion plays,' and C20 trauma theory
  • Aesthetic and affective response in Zadie Smith's On Beauty and EM Forster's Howards End
  • Afro-pessimism and the politics of disappointment
  • Representations of queer vampirism in the context of the HIV crisis
  • Performativity, embodiment, and autotheory in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts
  • Critical models of reading in the novels of Elif Batuman
  • Leslie Feinberg, butch lesbianism, and C20 industrial capitalism
  • Leslie Feinberg, life writing, and trans* histories of the subject
  • Post-humanism in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro

 

Recent publications

'The Pronominal Grammar of Ontological Anti-Blackness: Institutionality and Authority in Afropessimism and The Undercommons,' Authorship, 11:1 (2023), <https://doi.org/10.21825/authorship.85419>.

‘Repair: A New History,’ Review: The Ruse of Repair: U.S. Neoliberal Empire and the Turn From Critique by Patricia Stuelke, Cambridge Quarterly, 52:1 (2023). <https://doi.org/10.1093/camqtly/bfac032>.

‘Critical Cliché,’ Post45, Special Issue: 'The Potential of Cliché,' eds. Harriet S. Hughes and Siraj Sindhu [forthcoming in 2025]