Dissertation Title: Undeserved: Grieving Our Dead in the War on Drugs
Nikolaj (he/him) is a doctoral candidate in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. His research lies at the intersections of literary studies, cultural analysis, and critical race theory, with an emphasis on the rhetorical underpinnings of contemporary U.S. necropolitics. He focuses on representations of addiction and the construction of user (un)grievability during the War on Drugs (1971–) in literature and jurisprudence from that period.
Nikolaj's dissertation project traces the sociogenic origins of a "drug-doom" discourse that manufactures the user death it claims only to document. The project further explores how U.S. novelists from Toni Morrison (1931-2019) to Ocean Vuong (1988–) have subverted this discourse through nonpathologizing representations of neurodivergence and addiction that expose the imbrication of nacrophobic social and juridicial institutions in a puritanical, lethal moralism that powerfully abets the ongoing overdose and over-incarceration crises.