Dr. Corbin Hiday
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English, with scholarly interests and specializations across nineteenth and twentieth century British literature, the global anglophone novel and empire, literary and critical theory, and the environmental humanities.
My current book project tracks the emergence of literary forms drawn uniquely into imperial and ecological relation in the long nineteenth century. I intervene into a broader conversation regarding cultural representation and catastrophe, positing that ever since the bourgeois novel emerged as the privileged site of cultural production and capitalist extraction became globalized through empire, fictions have also registered ecological threats. Such an enduring problematic, I argue, necessitates an expanded temporal frame, and the global scale of environmental crisis requires a transnational archive from British writers like George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Emily Brontë to early-South African writers like Peter Abrahams and Caribbean writers like Sam Selvon.
Articles, Book Chapters, and Reviews
“‘India isn’t big enough for such as us’: Conrad and Kipling’s Fictions of Extraction,” Victorian Network, vol. 10, 2021, pp. 106-130.
“Heathcliff Walks.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 54.2, 2021, pgs. 248-269.
“Petrofiction as Stasis in Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland” in Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, edited by Stacey Balkan and Swaralipi Nandi. AnthropoScene Book Series. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021. Forthcoming.
“Nineteenth-Century Social Theory” in Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. Andrew Pendakis, Imre Szeman, and Jeff Diamanti, eds. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018.
“Reading Realism Dialectically.” Co-authored with Anna Kornbluh. A forum on Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons. Mediations 34.2, Spring 2021, pgs. 61-64.
“Formalization and its Futures: Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism and our Critical Moment,” b2o: an online journal, boundary 2, February 28, 2018 (Peer reviewed).
“How Bleak is Now?” in Our Critical Affects: Graduate Students Respond to V21 Special Issue of B2O. January 22, 2017.
“Reflection” from Collations: Book Forum on Jesse Oak Taylor’s The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction From Dickens to Woolf, for V21Collective. November 29, 2016.
Education
University of Illinois at ChicagoCarnegie Mellon University
University of Oregon, Eugene