RACHAEL L. NICHOLS
Visiting Assistant Professor in English
Office: Palamountain 331
Telephone: (518) 580-5193
Email: rnichol1@skidmore.edu; nichols.rachael@gmail.com
EDUCATION
- A.B., Brown University
- M.Phil., University of Waikato, New Zealand
- Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
RESEARCH & TEACHING INTERESTS
- Nineteenth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture
- Early American Studies
- American Studies
- Animal Studies
- Science and Literature
COURSES TAUGHT
- EN 105: Of Animals
- EN 211: Introduction to Fiction
- EN 226: Introduction to American Literature
- EN 324: American Fictions
- EN 362: Early American Literature and Culture
RESEARCH
- Animal Entanglements: Evolving Forms in U.S Literature and Culture, 1870-1920 [book manuscript in progress]
- Reconsidering the intersection of evolutionary theory and literary genre at the turn of the century, I show how Jack London, Frank Norris, and Mark Twain explored the epistemological collapse of the human-animal binary, in the process imagining a human subjectivity entwined with the animal.
PUBLICATIONS
- “Missing Links: Genre, Evolution, and Jack London's Before Adam." Science Fiction and Literary Naturalism. Special issue of Studies in American Naturalism 8.2 (Summer 2013).
- “Remembering Phillis Wheatley: The Historical Poetics of Robert Hayden,” The End of the American Century?, eds. Peter Bastian and Jan Pilditch. Sydney: Fulbright New Zealand with the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, 2004 (149-159).
FELLOWSHIPS & AWARDS
- Humane Society of the United States Summer Retreat Fellowship, 2012
- Mellon Graduate Research Assistantship, Penn Humanities Forum, 2009-2010
- Fulbright Scholarship, New Zealand, 2001-2002
- Phi Beta Kappa, 2001
