Jordan Howie

My research focuses on the cultural response to transportation and circulation as represented by American fiction and films from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Titled Great Points of Confusion: Scenes of Overwhelming Mobility in American Literature and Film, my dissertation uses emblematic spaces of intensified circulation—the hotel, the train, the urban street—to conceptualize the role that confusion plays in realist texts as they respond to and participate in constructions of the US citizen and modern individual. More broadly, I am interested in theories of urbanization and the built environment, early cinema and visual culture, queer theory and theories of gender and sexuality, literary modernism and theories of modernity, narrative theory, and history and theories of mobility and migration.