The Latest Additions

By Wenona Jonker

The Department of English is excited to welcome Byron Santangelo, who, in addition to his position as a Professor of English, has also been appointed as affiliate faculty in African Studies, International Studies, and the Environmental Resilience Institute. Dr. Santangelo graduated with his Ph.D. from UC Irvine in 1993 and has since held teaching appointments at DePaul University and, most recently, at the University of Kansas, where he taught for twenty-four years. His areas of expertise include African literature, postcolonial studies, and the environmental humanities.

Professor Byron Santangelo

His last book, Different Shades of Green: African Literature, Environmental Justice, and Political Ecology (2015), was a 2015 American Library Association Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a finalist for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Ecocriticism Book Prize. In this work, Dr. Santangelo deploys an interdisciplinary framework to explore the connection between environmental issues and social injustice through the “legacies of African environmental writing.” Dr. Santangelo understands his scholarly work as “nomadic,” not only in that he frequently crosses disciplinary boundaries, but also in that, as a postcolonial scholar, he tends to think in terms of overlapping cultural territories and the “relations of power that have shaped our world.” Having been drawn to IU, in part, by the interdisciplinary strength of the faculty across the university, Dr. Santangelo is excited by the rich history of the African Studies program and looks forward to working alongside other English faculty specializing in postcolonial and decolonial studies. In addition to specializing in African literature, Dr. Santangelo also enriches the department’s increasing strengths in the environmental humanities; his work in the intersection of African studies and the environmental humanities includes his comparative exploration of Conrad in African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality (2005), as well as his role co-editing Environment at the Margins: Literary and Environmental Studies in Africa (2011), which was the first collection of its kind.

Dr. Santangelo has contributed to a range of collections in his field, including Refugee Writing: Contemporary Research Across the Humanities (2020) and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene (2021). Additionally, he served as an executive committee member for the MLA Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities Forum from 2016 to 2021, acted as a visiting scholar with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in 2017, and, from 2014 to 2016, served as an executive council member for the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. These and other opportunities have placed him in a position to help shape the environmental humanities as a field.

Dr. Santangelo’s current book project, Storytelling for the Present and Future: Climate Nonfiction as an Art for Our Time, attends to the use of the creative nonfiction form by international authors in their depictions of global warming and considerations of differential relationships, especially in terms of “resilience or adaptations on the one hand and responsibility for mitigation on the other.” His recent graduate course, “Imagining Environmental Justice,” explores similar topics. Implicit to this project is the “collective project of making-with,” which entails thinking alongside other human as well as non-human agents in order to call into question agreed-upon modes of knowledge in favor of imagining different futures or ways forward. While this project focuses primarily on literary form, Dr. Santangelo believes that intellectual and creative activity cannot be separated from politics; central to his scholarly and pedagogical work is a commitment to both social and environmental justice. He looks forward to working with the Environmental Resilience Institute in exploring how his work might be applicable to the Indiana community.

While he does see the value in thinking in terms of rubrics and outcomes, as a teacher Dr. Santangelo values “transformation” above all. As a professor of Environmental Ethics and African literature at KU, he shaped his courses so that he might expose his students to new ways of seeing the world, new ways of “thinking ethics,” and new ways of understanding what environmentalism is. His commitment to his students is evident in a multitude of teaching awards—he is most proud of those that were student nominated, especially the 2007 Louise Byrd Graduate Educator Award and the 2005 Mabel Fry Teaching Award. In the future, Dr. Santangelo plans to offer courses in decolonizing knowledge, climate change, and African literature, among others.

The Department of English welcomes Assistant Professor of English Cass Turner, who graduated with their Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2018. Dr. Turner comes to us most recently as a lecturer in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and a postdoctoral fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. Dr. Turner brings to IU their expertise in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, the environmental humanities, and the history and theory of the novel.

Professor Cass Turner

Dr. Turner’s current research project, The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form, is broadly concerned with the act of “salvaging” in novels of the eighteenth century as a site for the recognition of a modern conception of waste as a “salvageable byproduct,” extending this model to an understanding of the novel itself as invested in the act of salvaging, both formally and conceptually. This project grew out of a sense that there were “contemporary and urgent reasons to be concerned about the status of waste,” and an interest in the ways that multiple understandings of “waste” intersect and shift in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Dr. Turner’s postdoctoral fellowships at Columbia University and in the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities Research Center at Rice University were not strictly English-focused and involved “having to make intellectual community with scholars across the humanities and social sciences.” Consequently, they see multidisciplinary conversations as being crucial to their interest in the environmental humanities and eighteenth-century literature, finding it “enlivening” to think across the tension that can sometimes exist between literary studies and more “solution- or impact-oriented work in the environmental humanities.” This commitment to multidisciplinary work can be observed, perhaps most saliently, in their multimedia project, “Elaborating Waste,” for which they received the 2017-18 Graduate Collaboration Grant from the Arts, Science, & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago alongside Hannah Burnett, a colleague in Anthropology.

As a preceptor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Summer Research Program, Dr. Turner equipped students in a range of humanities fields and from groups underrepresented in higher education to apply successfully to graduate schools. Out of this experience, they bring to IU an appreciation for the “magical thinking” that comes out of collaborative and experimental spaces in which “you don’t necessarily have a common language of disciplinary knowledge,” and they strive to enable students to be agents of their own learning. Along these lines, they have enjoyed being involved in the Experiments in Theory reading group at IU, and their recent courses, “Planetary Fictions” and “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,” engaged students in non-traditional assignments that required collaborative and audience-oriented writing. Drawing on their experiences visiting English landscapes as a fellow at the Chawton House Library and taking students in their “Castaways and Containers: Modernity at Sea” course to the Red Hook container terminal, Dr. Turner hopes to implement the field trip model in future courses as a way to bring students’ work into contact with more “embodied, material experiences.”

In Dr. Turner’s Spring 2022 course “The Eighteenth Century: Possessions and Dispossession,” students engaged with a range of texts, from theoretical and philosophical to more imaginative and literary, as they explored the genesis of the “modern liberal subject” understood as being organized around individual self-possession, as well as the kinds of dispossessions this necessarily entails. Dr. Turner is especially interested in the moments when a text “breaks down” and shows itself to be “motivated by forces that it excludes from view—race, gender, sexuality, and power.” This course paired well with the Spring 2022 workshop hosted by the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies entitled “The Collaborative Eighteenth Century,” which took place in May. Dr. Turner used this workshop as a space in which to explore issues of periodicity and “the ways in which authorship and knowledge production might be understood as collaborative and multiple,” and to question what “kinds of players get to count as part of collaboration.”

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