Anna Jones Abramson

Anna Jones Abramson received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016. Her current project, “The Age of Atmosphere: Air, Affect, and Technology in Modernist Literature,” traces the convergence of meteorological, affective, and aesthetic atmospheres in transnational modernism. The study suggests that, in the early twentieth century, technological innovations such as poison gas, airplanes, and modern weather forecasting made air lethal, palpable, and legible in unprecedented ways. Rather than following the traditional narrative of sensational shock and rupture in the literature surrounding two World Wars, the project argues for an alternative “atmospheric modernism” which revises the most familiar terms in modernist studies: fast becomes slow, shock becomes absorption, event becomes environment, detonation becomes diffusion, and psychological becomes nonhuman or transpersonal. This book project reflects a broader interest in uniting affect theory and environmental studies, two scholarly orientations that often seem diametrically opposed. She has published work on Virginia Woolf in The Journal of Modern Literature, on J.M. Coetzee in Otherness: Essays and Studies, and on Joseph Conrad in Studies in the Novel (forthcoming).