Emily Dickinson at the County Fair: The Land Grant College and the Birth of Agricultural Capitalism

A specialist in U.S. literature from 1850-2000, Maria Farland taught at Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and Wesleyan Universities before accepting a permanent position at Fordham University in New York City. Her forthcoming book, Degraded Heartland: Antipastoral, Agricultural Reform, and the Rural Modern in U.S. Literature, 1840-1950 (Johns Hopkins UP), is a history of ideas of rural backwardness in terms of antipastoral as a literary mode. Inspired in part by the Trump administration and our heightened awareness of rural-urban divisions, it is a scholarly and cultural history of ideas of rural inferiority, as seen in shocking events like the Eugenics Survey of Vermont. She is currently completing a study of the antipsychiatry movement and post-1945 U.S. literary representations of mental breakdown, around neoliberal models of healthcare privatization in the 1950s-1980s decades.

Please note: This lecture will NOT be recorded.