Overview
Susannah Sharpless is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English. Her dissertation, "The Terraqueous Romantic: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers Between Land and Sea," considers the destabilizing force of the ocean in nineteenth-century imaginaries of race, gender, and nation. Moving from the eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes, her project demonstrates how multiethnic North American women writers used their ecological proximity to maritime environments to include themselves in hemispheric stories of oceanic resistance. A portion of her chapter on Dickinson has been published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, and her article on how transhemispheric Black rebellions influenced Thomas Wentworth Higginson's post-Reconstruction politics was published in ESQ's special issue on Higginson. Her teaching has been recognized with Cornell's Deanne Gebell Gitner Annual Prize for Teaching Assistants, and she has published poems in Bennington Review and Jewish Currents, among others.
Research Focus
- ecocriticism
- Nineteenth-century poetry
- Poetry and poetics
- Women's literature
- African-American literature
- Maritime literature