The Posthumanism research cluster is one of the newer areas of research in the Department and includes faculty and graduate students from a range of historical periods working in areas such as Animal Studies, Object Oriented Ontology, Systems Theory, New Materialisms, Biopolitics, and Object Oriented Ontology. Faculty include Sarah Ellenzweig (18^th century British literature and culture, history of science and science studies, history of the novel and narrative theory), Joseph Campana (Renaissance literature, poetry and poetics, gender and sexuality, biopolitical thought), Timothy Morton (19^th Century British literature and culture, particularly poetry, Buddhism, Object Oriented Ontology, contemporary art and music, poetry and poetics, environmental Humanities and Philosophy of Ecology), and Cary Wolfe (modernism and contemporary literature, especially poetry and the U.S., animal studies, systems theory, pragmatism, environmental humanities, poetry and poetics, modern and contemporary art, biopolitical thought). Recent and current dissertation projects in the cluster include “ecotechnology” and ecology in a comparative U.S. and Canada Frame, “toxic networks,” systems discourse, and 20^th century literature, panorama and spectacle in 19^th century Britain, biopolitics and the Victorian novel, cross-species encounters in Victorian literature, biopolitics and the public sphere in post-settler colonial Australia, a posthumanist genealogy of pragmatism from the Puritans to the present, and visualizing racial science in 19^th century U.S. literature.

Faculty and graduate students in the cluster regularly participate in conferences such as the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Modern Language Association, the Comparative Literature Association, the American Literature Association, the American Studies Association, the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, the Western Literature Association, and many others, and several students in the cluster have organized entire panel slates in these venues. Recent graduates working in the cluster have secured tenure-track and postdoctoral fellowship positions at the University of Wollongong (Australia), Dartmouth College, and Columbia University. Faculty and students in the cluster have regularly published in journals such as American Literary History, Minnesota Review, English Language Notes, Culture, Theory, and Critique, American Literature, and the College Language Association, Studies in English Literature, English Literary History, American Literary History, New Geographies, New German Critique, PMLA, Minnesota Review, Cultural Critique, ISLE, Configurations, Journal of Posthumanist Studies, Angelaki, Substance, Parallax, Humanimalia, Environmental Humanities, and Environmental Philosophy, among others.