Dissertation fellow embarks on a Mellon Postdoc Fellowship

Completing my PhD at the University of Oregon with the support of the Oregon Humanities Center (OHC) has meant coming home in many ways.  I was raised in what is currently called Eugene, Oregon, and from a young age I had a deep desire to understand the divide between the region’s extraction industries and environmental groups like Earthfirst!, divisions that defined my family during the spotted owl debates of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In graduate school, I found the field of the environmental humanities to be a robust home for thinking through those debates and their relation to political theory, racial formation, and the representational challenges of climate change. 

As an OHC Dissertation Fellow, I was able to complete the fifth chapter of my dissertation (“Unfenceable Sovereignties: Unsettling Natures of Possession in Nineteenth-Century American Literature”), present my work at four national conferences, and clarify my first book project. The fellowship provided invaluable time for writing, revising, and networking. Still, one of the most significant benefits of the OHC fellowship was being a part of their community, learning from my fellow Fellows’ work that I was unlikely to come across otherwise. In the vital interdisciplinary space of OHC, I was likewise able to think and talk about my work in relation to contexts and scholars far outside my fields of expertise. 

OHC’s interdisciplinary ethic, events, and practice space provided crucial preparation for my next position as the 2019–21 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities (PPEH) at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, I will be researching, writing, and helping to build PPEH’s interdisciplinary, public humanities programming. Even as I make the move to Philadelphia, my roots remain deeply wedded to the place I was raised and the people there—the Kalapuya peoples who continue to nurture their homelands, as well as the Oregon Humanities Center and the many divisions it helps to suture.

April Anson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, PPEH on Lenape homelands; 2018–19 OHC Dissertation Fellow, English, University of Oregon on Kalapuyailihi (Kalapuya) homelands