Devon Anderson, BA MA MS

Universitätsassistentin

devon_anderson

Department of American Studies
University of Innsbruck
Innrain 52d
6020 Innsbruck

Office hours
by appointment
Humanities building, 3rd floor, room 40308

Tel: +43 512 507-41609
E-Mail: devon.anderson@uibk.ac.at
ORCID ID: 0009-0006-2867-6469

Devon Anderson is a doctoral candidate and university assistant. Her research interests include queer theory, gender theory, narrative theory, affect theory, life writing, theories of the public, and U.S. literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She has taught courses on literary analysis, queer modernism, and academic writing.

Devon’s dissertation project examines the narrative devices used to describe relationships between women in twentieth century queer life writing. With a focus on work by Hilda Doolittle, Djuna Barnes, Saidiya Hartman, and others, the dissertation considers how writers deploy unnarration and disnarration (Prince 1988), subjunctive narration, counterfactuals, and other “narrative refusals” (Warhol 2005) to make space for otherwise unnarratable desires, affects, and intimacies. By refusing to fill the gaps left in their narratives, and by instead telling us what could have happened, what should have happened, what did not happen, or what might still happen in a future yet to come, the writers examined open their texts to a “shadow world” (Warhol 2007) of queer possibilities that hover just beyond the limits of the narrated story. The dissertation draws from narratological, literary, and queer methodologies to illuminate the ways that that narrative refusals generate narrative space for queer subjectivity, queer temporality, and a queer auto/biographical voice capable of articulating the unnarrated fragments of the queer past.

Education

Since 2024: PhD candidate at the Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck
2016: MSc in Education, Hunter College, City University of New York
2011: MA in English, Brown University
2008: BA in English, University of California, Berkeley

Research Interests

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century American Literature
Queer Theory
Gender Studies
Narrative Theory
Affect Theory
Theories of the Public
Teaching & Pedagogy

Teaching

Wintersemester 2024/2025: VU Einführung in die Medienanalyse

Publications

Book Chapter

“‘We are left to seed another year’: Nature and Neglect in Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.” In Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, edited by Arin Keeble, Sheri-Marie Harrison and Maria Torres-Quevedo. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023. Pages 110-124.

Conferences & Workshop Presentations

“Authorship as Resistance: Narrative Refusals as Queer Narrative Forms.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, New Orleans, USA, January 2025.

“Queer Subjectivity and Narrative Form.” ISSN-GCC Micro-Conference. Online, July 2024.

“Fabulations, Speculations, & Refusals: Encountering Queer Narrative Forms.” Girl-Meets-Girl* Workshop, University of Vienna, November 2023.

“Disnarration in H.D.’s Madrigal Cycle.” Summer Course in Narrative Studies, Aarhus University, August 2023.

“Disnarration and Critical Fabulation in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.” Project Narrative Summer Institute, The Ohio State University, July 2021.

“‘I think of cinemas...’: Hart Crane’s Indirect Ekphrasis.” Northeastern Modern Language Association 2013 Convention, Boston MA, March 2013.

“Character is Who You Are When No One is Watching: Privacy and Nightwood’s Accidental Affects.” In-Trans: Reading Between and Beyond. City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center Conference, November 2012.

“‘[A]nd all else but the heart’: Community and Hart Crane’s Poetic Present.” Collapse/Catastrophe/Change. Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Brown University, March 2012.