| 204 Memorial Hall | | <div class="ExternalClass1480F145563148AC83AA700C706B4619"><p>Siobhan Carroll specializes in British
literature from 1750-1850 - the turbulent historical period called the
"Romantic Century" - and in modern science fiction and fantasy. She
is interested in the ways that literature has shaped our understanding of
empire, community, and the natural world. Her book, <em>An Empire of Air and
Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850</em> (University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), was runner-up for the British Association for
Romantic Studies First Book Prize. She is currently at work on a new project on
environmental agency in the 19th Century Anthropocene.</p><p>Professor Carroll's teaching interests include
18th and 19th century British literature, imperialism, nationalism, the
environmental imagination, game studies, marine studies, and science fiction
and fantasy literature. <br></p><p>
</p></div> | | | | | | | | | | | | sicarrol@udel.edu | | Carroll, Siobhan | | (302) 831-3657 | <img alt="" src="/Images%20Bios/FAC_Carroll_Siobhan-08_180.jpg" style="BORDER:0px solid;" /> | Director of Graduate Studies | | | http://voncarr-siobhan-carroll.blogspot.com/p/academic-work.html | Associate Professor | British Literature;Cultural Studies;Literature and Drama;Transatlantic / Transnational Studies;Creative Writing;Environmental Humanities;American Literature | Ph.D. English, Indiana University - Bloomington | |
| An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in British Imagination, 1750-1850 | Carroll, Siobhan | | University of Pennsylvania Press | Philadelphia | 2015 | http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/15349.html | Planetary spaces such as the poles, the oceans, the atmosphere, and subterranean regions captured the British imperial imagination. Intangible, inhospitable, or inaccessible, these blank spaces--what Siobhan Carroll calls "atopias"--existed beyond the boundaries of known and inhabited places. The eighteenth century conceived of these geographic outliers as the natural limits of imperial expansion, but scientific and naval advances in the nineteenth century created new possibilities to know and control them. This development preoccupied British authors, who were accustomed to seeing atopic regions as otherworldly marvels in fantastical tales. Spaces that an empire could not colonize were spaces that literature might claim, as literary representations of atopias came to reflect their authors' attitudes toward the growth of the British Empire as well as the part they saw literature playing in that expansion.
Siobhan Carroll interrogates the role these blank spaces played in the construction of British identity during an era of unsettling global circulations. Examining the poetry of Samuel T. Coleridge and George Gordon Byron and the prose of Sophia Lee, Mary Shelley, and Charles Dickens, as well as newspaper accounts and voyage narratives, she traces the ways Romantic and Victorian writers reconceptualized atopias as threatening or, at times, vulnerable. These textual explorations of the earth's highest reaches and secret depths shed light on persistent facets of the British global and environmental imagination that linger in the twenty-first century. | sicarrol | | |
| The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic | <p><em>The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic</em> argues for the crucial role played by nineteenth-century texts in
forging an understanding of <em>human environmental agency </em>– the capacity of
human beings to intervene in ecological systems. Conceptions of human
environmental agency are key to our current understanding – or denial – of the
human role in phenomena such as climate change. Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty
famously remarked of the Anthropocene, there is a “question
of… human collectivity” that accompanies any discussion of large-scale
environmental agency at the level of the human species. Rather than
sidestepping this question, this investigation unpacks the history of how
certain kinds of natural engineering came to be associated with imperial power,
while others – such as the agencies of Scottish Highlanders, Native Americans,
and African slaves – were repressed in imperial discourse. Attending to human
environmental agency in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley,
Walter Scott, Mary Prince, Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and H.G. Wells also means
attending to the means by which certain environmental agencies were excluded
from, while others came to define, the category of “the human.” </p><p>
</p> | Carroll, Siobhan | sicarrol | | <img alt="" src="/graduate-sub-site/PublishingImages/19thC%20Oceans%20class%20at%20museum.JPG" style="BORDER:0px solid;" /> | | | | | |
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