Department of English
Faculty Accomplishments
Sarah Anderson
Branka Arsić
Zahid R. Chaudhary
Sarah Chihaya
Sarah M. Anderson
Zahid Chaudhary
My essay, “Stu dies in Medieval Star-Gazing,” was published as an invited essay for a special issue of the journal Arthuriana on the subject of “assembly.” The paper considers human acts of looking at the stars (or at what were thought to be stars) as aligned with richly generative practices of naming, translation, wordplay and cosmological speculation, as well as with cultural practices. The problem of the star and of the constellation is exposed through ancient works of both aesthetic and practical value, drawing examples from Cicero’s Aratea, the “Bayeux Tapestry” and select works of Geoffrey Chaucer (especially his “Boece,” “The House of Fame,” “A Treatise on the Astrolabe” and the prologue and tale of “The Wife of Bath”).
I received a contract from Fordham University Press for my forthcoming book, “Unruly Truth: Libidinal Politics and Crises of Authority.” The book is a psychoanalytic account of post-truth politics, populism and mass paranoia in the United States and Europe. Examining how truth can function as a conduit into relations of power and authority, the book takes up contemporary conspiracy cultures, the recent emergence of whistleblowing as a form of political participation, online anonymity, and the appearance of strange new bodily symptoms that seem to index mass psychological maladies. Guided by Hannah Arendt’s ordering of truth and falsehood, I point to enduring hostility between truth and politics. This conflict means that “reading” lies forms a necessary part of humanistic study.
In February, I led an interactive workshop in the Princeton University Art Museum (PUAM) series, titled “A Long Look at Love: ‘Venus and Amor’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder.” In this workshop, I exposed an extraordinary series of subjects in Cranach’s complex mythographic portrait (1518-1520), one of the most imposing and challenging gems held by the PUAM.
Branka Arsić Visiting Professor and Class of 1932 Fellow in the Council of the Humanities and the Department of English In August 2021, I published a collected edition called “Dispersion, Thoreau and Vegetal
2
Thought.” Grounded in Thoreau’s ecology and in contemporary plant studies, this volume ponders questions of how plants, despite their seeming stillness, can inform our ecological thought, ethics and politics through their methods of life and connection. This fall, I am teaching a graduate seminar on literary and cultural theory, which explores how 19th-century (mostly) American authors registered the transformation of natural history into the sciences of life, and how attentiveness to the ecological fashioned their ethics. Most of our authors adopted a vitalist and materialist understanding of life, which led them to understand the boundaries of individual phenomena as porous and environmental. Changing their understanding of what the natural is, they proposed a series of cosmological, poetic and ethical responses to the idea that life is common to all creatures and in fact to all phenomena, and that matter is inherently dynamic and vitalized.
Sarah A. Chihaya I recently published a review of Mieko Kawakami’s “Breasts and Eggs” in the New York Review of Books, where I was also the subject of a short profile. In July, I became a senior editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), which is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary. To mark the occasion, LARB is hosting a series of public roundtables this fall that may be of interest to friends of the department. The series, titled “The Semipublic Intellectual Sessions,” will feature Princeton English alumni K. Austin Collins and Jesse McCarthy,
