Hannah Walser

Hannah Walser
Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at CCSRE

Hannah Walser is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She received her Ph.D. in English from Stanford in 2016. Her book manuscript, titled Thinking with Strangers: Theories of Mind in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, explains how canonical American novels model social cognition under conditions of extreme inequality or epistemic inaccessibility. She is also part of a team using text mining to investigate racial and ethnic discourse in nineteenth-century American literature at the Stanford Literary Lab.

 
While at CCSRE during the 2019-20 academic year, Hannah will be working on a second project examining textual descriptions of persons as a primary locus of racialization. One article related to this project, "Under Description: The Fugitive Slave Advertisement as Genre," will appear in American Literature in January 2020; another, on Herman Melville's Pierre and the relationship of physical likeness to ancestry, is in process. Hannah has also published in Narrative, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, and The Cambridge Companion to the Novel (2018).

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