Family photo
Welcome to my curious repository of images, writings, and ephemera.
I am a researcher, writer, and educator who specializes Victorian literature and culture, archival studies and book history, and ecocriticism. I received my PhD in English from University of California, Riverside. I am a lecturer in English at California State University San Bernardino where I teach courses in Global Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, and British Literature (among others.)
I am currently at work on a research project, tentatively titled Strange Flora, that explores the enduring presences of Victorian plants within the contemporary "climate change archive." My work brings into conversation book history and plant humanities through their shared interest in the materials of more-than-human storytelling to highlight how nineteenth-century plants provoke new discursive and material imaginings of "the book nature" in its past and present forms. Mapping out vernacular botanizing and bookmaking practices that cropped up around Carl Linnaeus' twenty-fourth class of plants (algae, fungi, ferns, mosses, and lichens) during the long-nineteenth century, Strange Flora argues that a turn to Victorian cultures of botanical collecting and archiving may help us to address the questions that currently shape the field of biodiversity informatics.
In support of this work, I was a participant in a 2018 National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute ("The Book: Material Histories and Digital Futures"), and a 2020 Researcher-in-Residence with the Oak Springs Garden Foundation. My academic writing appears in European Journal of English Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture (and JVC Online), Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers. I was the Nineteenth Century Studies Association's 2020 Emerging Scholar for my article on artist-botanist Anna Atkins's seaweed cyanotypes (Victorian Literature and Culture.)
As a Victorian collector born too late, I'm an enthusiastic sorter, pinner, and saver. You can comb through my strange collections at: https://www.pinterest.com/iamgarascia/.
I am a researcher, writer, and educator who specializes Victorian literature and culture, archival studies and book history, and ecocriticism. I received my PhD in English from University of California, Riverside. I am a lecturer in English at California State University San Bernardino where I teach courses in Global Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism, and British Literature (among others.)
I am currently at work on a research project, tentatively titled Strange Flora, that explores the enduring presences of Victorian plants within the contemporary "climate change archive." My work brings into conversation book history and plant humanities through their shared interest in the materials of more-than-human storytelling to highlight how nineteenth-century plants provoke new discursive and material imaginings of "the book nature" in its past and present forms. Mapping out vernacular botanizing and bookmaking practices that cropped up around Carl Linnaeus' twenty-fourth class of plants (algae, fungi, ferns, mosses, and lichens) during the long-nineteenth century, Strange Flora argues that a turn to Victorian cultures of botanical collecting and archiving may help us to address the questions that currently shape the field of biodiversity informatics.
In support of this work, I was a participant in a 2018 National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Institute ("The Book: Material Histories and Digital Futures"), and a 2020 Researcher-in-Residence with the Oak Springs Garden Foundation. My academic writing appears in European Journal of English Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Journal of Victorian Culture (and JVC Online), Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women Writers. I was the Nineteenth Century Studies Association's 2020 Emerging Scholar for my article on artist-botanist Anna Atkins's seaweed cyanotypes (Victorian Literature and Culture.)
As a Victorian collector born too late, I'm an enthusiastic sorter, pinner, and saver. You can comb through my strange collections at: https://www.pinterest.com/iamgarascia/.