Dr Dana Van Kooy
Visiting Research Fellow, February 2022 - July 2022
Home Institution: Michigan Technological University
Dana Van Kooy (@DanaVanKooy) is Associate Professor of Transnational Literature, Literary Theory and Culture and Director of the English program in the Humanities department at Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan, United States. She is the author of Shelley’s Radical Stages: Performance and Cultural Memory in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Routledge 2016) and the guest editor for a special issue, Teaching Romantic-Period Drama for Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840 (September 2018). Her articles have appeared in several edited collections and have been published in Studies in Romanticism, The Keats-Shelley Review, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, and Literature Compass. She was the recipient of the Fulbright National Library of Scotland Scholar Award for 2019-20. Her research interests include theatre history and performance studies, Romanticism, Atlantic studies, Caribbean studies, and environmental humanities.
Project Title: Atlantic Configurations and the Aesthetics of Disappearance Manuscript
This project is a transnational and interdisciplinary study of the Atlantic world from 1745 to 1845. It examines the construction, proliferation, and circulation of characters and landscapes to describe the Atlantic world, its topography, and its peoples. Scanning the Atlantic from Scotland and Ireland to the Americas and the Caribbean, artists and writers adopted cultural and geographical configurations and deployed aesthetic frameworks, like the picturesque, to depict the Atlantic world and the changing relationships between its peoples in the colonial period. Tracing the aesthetic interplay of these texts and images in terms of different populations and geographical locales, Professor Van Kooy explores and explains how these cultural productions reiterated and countered the aesthetics of disappearance that cheapened and devalued humanity, labour, and land, replacing ecosystems with agrosystems, and displacing emerging democracies with what Achille Mbembe refers to as “necropolitics.”
While working in Edinburgh, Professor Van Kooy’s research focus will be James Grainger’s georgic poem, The Sugar Cane (1764) and J.C Cross’s pantomime, Harlequin Highlander; or, Sawney Bean’s Cave (1798). She is specifically interested in how these writers employed georgic poetry and pantomime to create modern fictions of identity, collectivity, and place within the contexts of colonization.