Department of English

• Monday, April 6, 2026 - 1:00pm to 3:00pm

Fisher-Bennett Hall Faculty Lounge (room 135) and Zoom

On Monday, April 6, Jacob Nielsen will defend his dissertation "The Anti-Marriage Plot in the Age of Informal Empire, 1850-1930." Jacob writes:

In "The Anti-Marriage Plot in the Age of Informal Empire, 1850-1930," I argue that a new type of imperial novel emerged in the nineteenth century where marriage and its adjacent forms—alliance, coalition, union, association—became extraordinarily fraught proxies for understanding a convoluted, Anglo-centric world-system. In reading novels by José Mármol (Amalia), Anthony Trollope (The Prime Minister), Clorinda Matto de Turner (Aves sin nido), Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World), and Benito Lynch (El inglés de los güesos), I find that something curious happens in texts where the marriage plot intersects with the material infrastructures—ports, railroads, storehouses—and spatial expressions of Britain's informal (or economic) empire in Latin America. Instead of solidifying national identity, spurring progress, or neatly ordering narrative and imperial worlds, the marriage plot exerts an unexpectedly corrosive, disaggregating, and disorienting effect. Desire fails and often fails spectacularly, leaving trails of dismembered bodies, fractured unions, and distorted flesh in its wake. Indeed, marriage plots fracture and collapse so violently as to result in what I call an anti-marriage plot. When a potential transatlantic network between Britain and South America enters the narrative, characters and their drives toward union implode, fundamentally altering domestic and foreign alliance and catalyzing chaos in the novel's portrayal of time, space, and flesh.

The defense will be a hybrid event, held both in the FBH Faculty Lounge (room 135) and on Zoom (please contact Jacob for the link). The private portion of the defense will take place from 12 to 1 pm, and the public portion of the defense will take place from 1 to 2 pm, to be followed by a celebratory reception.

We hope to see you there as we congraulate Jacob on this wonderful achievement!