Research
A book about how to live without a future.
Winner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Book Prize and finalist for the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Book Prize.
Infrastructures of Apocalypse is an extraordinary book. It demonstrates how postwar American literature documents the ways that nuclear technology becomes national infrastructure, with consequences for how we can understand the distribution of risk and resource in the period. Jessica Hurley’s innovative readings and keen narrative sensibility render infrastructural relations at their most paradoxical and most political. This is an urgent and timely account of how our self-made apocalypses are entangled with long historical processes and what their alternate futures may comprise. — Kate Marshall, author of Corridor: Media Architectures in American Fiction
Infrastructures of Apocalypse will instantly take its place in the growing tradition of environmental justice criticism that is carefully attuned to the entangled legacies of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the environment—and to the potential of radical futureless-ness to enact a more just present. — ISLE
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Infrastructures of Apocalypse reviews:
by Dan Sinykin in Jewish Currents
by Delia Byrnes in ISLE
by Douglas Dowland in Lateral
by John Hay in Studies in the Novel
by Shane Hall in American Studies
by Steven Watts in ASAP/Journal
Cover Design: Matt Avery at Monograph Studio
Special Issues:
Resilience, 2021
with Stephanie Foote, John Levi Barnard, and Jeffrey Insko
American Literature, 2021
with Stephanie Foote, John Levi Barnard, and Jeffrey Insko
Articles, Book Chapters, Introductions, Public-Facing Writing:
Peer Reviewed and Book Chapters:
“The Pikinni Ghost: Nuclear Hauntings and Spectral Decolonizations in the Pacific.” Nuclear Ghosts. Special issue, Apocalyptica (forthcoming).
“Empire, Infrastructure, and the Speculative Turn.” Genres of Empire. Special issue, College Literature 50.2-3 (forthcoming Summer 2023).
“Nuclear Settler Colonialism at Sea, or, How to Civilize an Ocean.” American Quarterly 74.4 (December 2022).
“Postface: Unmaking the Nuclear Future.” Toxic Immanence: Decolonizing Nuclear Futures and Legacies, ed. Livia Monnet (Montréal: McGill University Press, 2022).
“Infrastructure Beyond Control: Clowning the Nuclear Age.” Control. Special issue, symplokē 28.1-2 (Fall 2020), 101-116.
“Complicity, for the Time Being: Nuclear Entanglements from Atoms for Peace to Fukushima.” Complicity. Special issue, Comparative Literature Studies 56.4 (Fall 2019), 750-768.
“The Nuclear Uncanny in Oceania.” Unsettling Oceania. Special issue, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 41.1 (Autumn 2018), 25-35.
“Impossible Futures: Fictions of Risk in the Longue Durée.” American Literature 89:4 (December 2017), 761-789. Winner of the Don D. Walker Prize in Western Literature; honorable mention for the 1921 Prize in American Literature.
“History is What Bites: Race, Zombies, and the Limits of Biopower in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.” Extrapolation 56:3 (December 2015), 311-333.
“Still Writing Backwards: Literature After the End of the World.” Apocalypse in Contemporary Culture. Special issue, Frame Journal of Literary Studies 26.1 (May 2013), 61-76.
“War as Peace: Afterlives of Nuclear War in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.” The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, eds. Michael Blouin, Morgan Shipley, Jack Taylor (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 192-210.
“Ghostwritten: Kinship and History in Absalom, Absalom!” The Faulkner Journal 26.2 (Fall 2012), 23-41. Winner of the Jim Hinkle Memorial Prize.
Introductions:
“Introduction: The Infrastructure of Emergency.” With Jeffrey Insko. The Infrastructure of Emergency. Special issue of American Literature 93.3 (September 2021), 345-359.
“Introduction: Apocalypse.” With Dan Sinykin. Apocalypse. Special issue of ASAP/Journal 3.3 (September 2018), 451-466.
Public-facing and non-peer reviewed:
“The Irradiated Body as Postcolonial Lost Edge.” “Hard/Soft/Lost Edges” research cluster, ASAP/Journal (forthcoming).
“On the ethics of impossibility.” With Dan Sinykin. “Neoliberalism and Apocalypse,” The Imminent Frame, Social Science Research Council (March 2021).
“Apocalypse from Below: Nuclear Infrastructures and Radical Futurelessness.” ASLE web feature (October 2020).
“An Apocalypse is a Relative Thing: An Interview with N.K. Jemisin.” Apocalypse. Special issue of ASAP/Journal 3.3 (September 2018), 467-477.