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

Administrative responsibilities

• Director of BA Liberal Arts

Research

Research interests

• Contemporary US literature
• Histories of race and racism
• Feminism
• Environmental justice

Research overview

My current book project, Women and the Anthropocene: Peopling the Planet in an Age of Climate Crisis, explores the unacknowledged centrality of women in the Anthropocene imaginary by highlighting population alarmism, the fear of excessive human numbers, as a deep-seated feature of American culture. Its starting point is three pivotal contemporary American-centred novels: Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The book argues that the modern American environmental movement, and the scholarly concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ to which it has given rise, bears the long shadow of Malthusian thought and its misanthropic tendencies. Through literary exploration, and taking in the histories of colonisation, slavery and eugenics as part of the same intellectual stream as much western environmental thinking, I want to examine the fact that women, as the class of people who bear most of the burden of human reproduction, also bear the burden of this discourse.

This work builds on previous research exploring the intersections of contemporary literature, race and the environmental humanities. My last 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,

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 Contemporary Literature and Culture, MA Modern Literature and Culture and the MA Critical Theory. 

Teaching modules

• Arts, Humanities and the Lifecycle 1 - Issues and Ideas (ARAR015S4)
• Theorising the Contemporary, Contemporary Theorising (AREN095S7)
• Connecting the Arts (AREN126S5)
• Production of the Human: Decolonising the Canon (AREN257S4)
• Writing the Planet (AREN292S7)
• The Novel: Writing the Modern World (ENHU009S5)
• Contemporary US Fiction (ENHU053S7)
• Critical Entanglements and Methods in the Medical Humanities (SSHC483S7)

Publications

Business and community

Outreach

‘Women, Climate Justice, and the Politics of Population Control’, The Radical Notion: A Feminist Quarterly, Winter 2022, https://theradicalnotion.org/women-climate-justice-and-the-politics-of-population-control/

‘America in Crisis’, Centre for Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck, June 2020, http://www.ccl.bbk.ac.uk/america-in-crisis/

‘The very different depictions of Hurricanes Harvey and Katrina’, Open Democracy, 5 December 2017, https://www.opendemocracy.net/anna-hartnell/very-different-depictions-of-hurricanes-harvey-and-katrina

‘The Inauguration of Donald Trump’, Birkbeck English, Theatre and Creative Writing, 24 January 2017, http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/english/2017/01/24/anna-hartnell-on-the-inauguration-of-donald-trump/

‘New Orleans's “transformation” hurt residents who needed it most’, Guardian, 26 August 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/commentisfree/2015/aug/26/new-orleans-transformation-hurt-residents

‘It’s dangerous to draw parallels between Selma and today’, The Conversation, 5 February 2015, http://theconversation.com/its-dangerous-to-draw-parallels-between-selma-and-today-37235

‘Michael Gove should not Kill the Mockingbird’, Guardian, 26 May 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/26/michael-gove-to-kill-a-mockingbird-harper-lee-gcse-syllabus

‘Cry You One: A Front-Row View of Louisiana’s Slow Death’, Times Higher Education, 7 November 2013: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/a-front-row-view-of-louisianas-slow-death/2008687.article

‘Obama’s Passover Liberation Theology’, Guardian, 24 April 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/apr/24/judaism-islam

‘The Rise of the Religious Left’, Guardian, 16 October 2009:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/oct/16/american-christians-progressive

‘New Orleans’ Green Dilemma’, Guardian, 29 August 2009: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/29/hurricane-katrina-new-orleans-green

‘The Disneyfication of New Orleans,’ Guardian, 28 August 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/28/usa.hurricanekatrina?gusrc=rss&feed=worldnews

Blog: ‘After Katrina: A View from the Outside’: http://blogs.bbk.ac.uk/afterkatrina/