Stanford Humanities Center
Juliana Spahr is professor of literature and languages and Dean of Graduate Studies at Mills College. Her research focuses on literature’s complicated relationship to nation state politics, with a special interest in its relationship to resistance movements. Her most recently scholarly book is Du Bois’s Telegram (Harvard U P, 2018).
SHC Project
Literature’s Troubled Democratization
Literature’s Troubled Democratization begins with the recognition that contemporary literary production in the United States is vexed and uniquely complicated as it is experiencing big and often contradictory changes-increasing production, increasing institutionalization, and decreasing consumption—and the ramifications of these changes are under-recognized. Using a range of approaches, including data collection, computational analysis, archival research, and close reading, Spahr's project explores how large scale changes to contemporary literary production impact not just the demographics of US literary production but also understandings of literature’s role in the public sphere, its relationship to various sorts of politics, and the role that it plays in multiculturalism.
