Anahid Nersessian is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA. Her research and teaching are rooted in the literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a special emphasis on the Romantic period. She is particularly invested in the study of rhetoric and form: her first book, Utopia, Limited (Harvard, 2015), finds Romantic poetry modeling minimally harmful practices of renunciation, self-containment, and adaptation in a world of finite resources, while her current project, The Calamity Form, explores tropological and figurative perspectives on ecological crisis. This second project also engages the history of literary criticism alongside the philosophy of science, from Kant to Ian Hacking. She is the editor of the Broadview Press edition of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s long poem, Laon and Cythna, and managing editor of the open-access journal Environmental Humanities.
Supported by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University