Dr Anna Hartnell

Overview

Biography

I was appointed to Birkbeck in 2010, having worked in the American and Canadian Studies Department at the University of Birmingham for the previous three years.

My research has focused primarily on contemporary literary and cultural constructions of ‘America’, and has been concerned with the ways in which the national narrative is articulated in relation to race and religion, as well as its intersections with postcoloniality and globalization. My work is particularly interested in US cultural constructions of perceived moments of rupture and crisis, and the ethical and political implications these representations have for issues of racial and environmental justice.

Qualifications

• BA American Studies, University of Sheffield, 2001
• MA Contemporary Approaches to English Studies, Goldsmiths, 2002
• PhD , Goldsmiths, 2007

Web profiles

• The Guardian

Research

Research overview

All of my work so far has been interested in constructions of the future in US culture.

My latest book, After Katrina: Race, Neoliberalism, and the End of the American Century (SUNY Press, 2017), situates post-Katrina New Orleans in the context of US nationalism, globalization and neoliberalism, and current debates about US decline. It examines the conflict between problematic pre-Katrina constructions of New Orleans as past in relation to the United States, and equally troubling post-Katrina projections of the city as a neoliberal laboratory for national and transnational futures. Through an exploration of cultural representations of the city - literary, cinematic, visual, musical, political, journalistic etc. - with particular reference to movements for racial and environmental justice, the book explores the commentary the post-storm city offers on contemporary America.

This book was completed as part of an AHRC early career fellowship in 2013/14, during which I spent three months in New Orleans as a visiting scholar at Tulane University, where I organized a conference titled After Katrina: Transnational Perspectives on the Futures of the Gulf South. The latter part of the fellowship was dedicated to exploring the wider horizons of the project which culminated in a conference held at Birkbeck in London: Rupture, Crisis, Transformation: New Directions in US Studies at the End of the American Century.

This project picked up on many of the themes explored in my first book, Rewriting Exodus: American Futures from Du Bois to Obama (Pluto, 2011). This book examines the genealogy of the Exodus narrative in African American thought in the twentieth century, against the contemporary backdrop of the election of Barack Obama, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and the post-9/11 US landscape. Chapters on Obama, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Toni Morrison and Hurricane Katrina explore Exodus as a vehicle through which black American thinkers and activists have articulated often vexed relationships to American exceptionalism, as well as to wider diasporic links with black Atlantic and Jewish traditions.

New research continues to focus on issues of racial and environmental justice, the theme of US decline and cultural constructions of the climate crisis. 

Supervision and teaching

Supervision

Supervisions within Birkbeck:

9

I have supervised students on Djuna Barnes, David Foster Wallace, the 9/11 novel, Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster, the American suburbs and the literature of the American South. I welcome applications from people interested in working on US literature and culture, particularly projects that centre on race, feminism, and the climate crisis. 

Current doctoral researchers

• FIONA BUCK

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Aug 2023 onwards

  Title of thesis:

  Nurturing a Moment: Modernist Poetry and the Greenwich Village Salon

• TATUM ANDERSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2020 onwards

Doctoral alumni since 2013-14

• JOSE RICARDO RAMOS MORAIS

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2013

  Title of thesis:

  Guilt and Innocence in the US 9/11 Novel

  Awarded:

  2016

• ERIN REILLY

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor, Oct 2012 to Oct 2015

  Title of thesis:

  Towards an Ethical Culture: American Mythologies and the Limits of Freedom in the work of David Foster Wallace

  Awarded:

  2022

• ERIN REILLY

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Oct 2015

  Title of thesis:

  Towards an Ethical Culture: American Mythologies and the Limits of Freedom in the work of David Foster Wallace

  Awarded:

  2022

• SOODY GHOLAMI

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor, Mar 2019

  Title of thesis:

  Encountering the Unhomely in the Post-Imperial British Novel

  Awarded:

  2020

• PIPPA ELDRIDGE

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  The Poetics of Sprawl: Literary and Filmic Engagements with American Suburbia, 1990-2017

  Awarded:

  2019

• ALEXANDER WILLIAMSON

  Nature of supervision:

  Joint Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  Reading to You, or the Aesthetics of Marriage: Dialogic Intertextuality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster

  Awarded:

  2018

• NICHOLAS HOCKING

  Nature of supervision:

  Principal Supervisor

  Title of thesis:

  An insubstantial defence of the Father, incorporating Djuna Barnes' melancholy corpus

  Awarded:

  2017

Teaching

I currently teach on the BA English, BA Liberal Arts, MA Cultural and Critical Studies, and the MFA Creative Writing. 

I have taught and convened the following undergraduate modules at Birkbeck:

The Novel

Romance

Production of the Human: Decolonising the Canon

The 'American Century' and Beyond: US Literature and Culture since 1900

And the following postgraduate modules:

Globalization and the Climate Crisis

Reading the Contemporary

Reading and Writing the Contemporary

Contemporary US Fiction

Narrating Nation after 9/11

Teaching modules

• Theorising the Contemporary, Contemporary Theorising (AREN095S7)
• Production of the Human: Decolonising the Canon (AREN257S4)
• Writing the Planet (AREN292S7)
• Modes of American Writing (AREN301S7)
• Literature, Empire and Race (ENHU004S5)
• Critical Entanglements and Methods in the Medical Humanities (SSHC483S7)

Publications