Penn Arts & Sciences Logo

Zach Fruit

(he/him/his)

2021 Ph.D. Graduate
Dissertation Advisor(s): Emily Steinlight
"The Lie of the Land: Landscape Aesthetics and British Realism"

Ahamanson-Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies, UCLA

My research interests are focused on 19th century histories of British empire, the history of aesthetic theory, and the intersection of both in the realist novel. I hope to build an argument that details the imbrication of the production of space that is achieved through aesthetic strategies of narrative description, and the placemaking dynamics of imperial expansion. My thinking is also informed by the history of enclosure and agricultural improvement, theories of landscape architecture, and Marxist conceptualizations of the world system.

 

Hunter College MA, Emerson College BFA 

 

Published writing: 

"EnclosureVictorian Literature and Culture, vol. 46, no. 3-4, (2018): 672–675.

"Conducting Narrative: Pati Hill's Men and Women in Sleeping Cars." Pati Hill Photocopier: A Survey of Prints and Books, Arcadia University Art Gallery, (2017): 148-151

Review of Nathan K. Hensley, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (Oxford UP, 2016), V21 Collations: Book Forum (May, 2017)

The Collective Problem of History Presentism and/as Critique: Graduate Students Respond to V21 Special Issue of B20, (January, 2017)

Review of Anna Kornbluh, Realizing Capital: Financial and Psychic Economies in Victorian Form (Fordham UP, 2014), Textual Practice 30.6 (2016): 1138-1142 

Courses Taught

spring 2019

ENGL 200.304 Victorian Environments  

fall 2016

ENGL 103.202 Comics and Graphic Novels