Erin Baldwin

PhD Candidate

Campus

Areas of Interest

  • Modernism
  • Global Modernisms
  • Critical Addiction Studies
  • 20th and 21st Century British and Anglophone Literature
  • Early 20th Century American Literature

Biography

My dissertation focuses on representations of addiction in modernist literature and elucidates addiction as a phenomenon underpinned by psychosocial dislocation and the interlocking violences prevalent in a capitalist mode of production. In doing so, I argue that literary narratives hold the necessary and urgent capacity to challenge pernicious discourses that frequently explain addiction as the by-product of a malfunctioning individual will.

I have presented papers on the modernist writers Jean Rhys and May Sinclair at the MLA Conventions in 2021 and 2022. My book chapter focused on the intersection of Marx and Engels' concept of the lumpenproletariat and Rhys's novel Good Morning, Midnight is forthcoming in the anthology, The Idea of the Lumpenproletariat (Routledge).