Michelle Neely, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, will present the lecture "A 'Meal Equally Set': Digesting the Nation in Leaves of Grass" at 5:00 pm February 7 in 100 McKenna Hall.
Michelle Neely received her PhD in English from the University of California at Irvine. Her research and teaching interests include animal studies, African American and Native American literatures, food studies, ecocriticism, gender and sexuality, and theories of democracy and human rights. Her current book project, The Antebellum Animal, examines literary, philosophical, and popular representations of animal life during the nineteenth century to show how the period’s changing conceptions of “the animal” helped reshape understandings of personhood, kinship, race, and literary character. Her article on the vegetarian politics of Sylvester Graham and Henry David Thoreau is forthcoming in American Literature.