David started following the journal Studies in the Novel.
David started following the work of Jeremy Engels, Penn State University, Communication Arts & Sciences.
David started following the work of Steven Bruhm.
The University of Western Ontario
Faculty Member, Department of English
The University of Western Ontario, Centre for American Studies
Lecturer
Thesis Title: States of Insurgency: Dismemberment and Citizenship in the American 1848
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Bryce Traister
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About
I teach in the departments of English and American Studies at the University of Western Ontario. My research explores the dynamics of democracy, citizenship, nation, and empire in the antebellum United States. I am particularly interested in the relationships between U.S. discourses of democracy and figures who are positioned "outside" of democracy.
Currently, I am working on developing my dissertation "States of Insurgency: Dismemberment and Citizenship in the American 1848" into a publishable manuscript. This project argues that the discourse of counterinsurgency was crucial to the consolidation of a narrow, enervated ideal of American citizenship. The state, I argue, produces the people through legal, discursive, and physical processes of dismemberment that contain the insurgent potential of the multitude.
I am also in the early stages of developing a project that explores the relationship between piracy and democracy in the antebellum period. This examination of various literary depictions of piracy explores some of the ways in which pirate fiction participated in ongoing debates over the nature and complexion of "democracy" in the nineteenth century United States.
