Research
Current Book Projects
Caring at a Distance:
Dispassionate Bonds of Community in the Long Eighteenth Century
Caring at a Distance argues that for a diverse group of scientists and poets writing at different points in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the process of observing a scene of suffering without emotion forges relations between the sufferers of pain and their witnesses by making pain an objective, shareable fact that even wildly disparate individuals can jointly attest to. Studied with the disinterestedness that was foundational to the practice of early experimental science, pain does not remain a private, overwhelming experience accessible to others only via the nebulous workings of the imagination, but is instead rendered publicly verifiable by virtue of being understood as empirical phenomena apprehensible through the senses of all. Consequently, it commands the attention of a community, and demands a communal response.
Living and Leaving:
A Geological View of Death
Living and Leaving revises established understandings of grief and remembrance by locating the dead and dying against the backdrop of deep time. Surveying the geological treatises, travel narratives, sermons, and folktales from the mid eighteenth- to the mid nineteenth- century, a time commonly thought of as the “golden age” of geology, it shows that for many writers of this period, fossils and skeletons conjure up a vision of death so intense that those looking upon these artifacts temporarily experience death as well. Observers of these remains see or feel themselves being covered with sediment, submerged in water, hardening into strata, and in general, being overwhelmed by the earth’s convulsions and slow, creeping movements. To witness a scene of death is to remember that our living bodies already know what it feels like to die.
Publications
Peer-Reviewed Articles
This essay studies the strange ambivalences of Stedman’s Narrative in order to develop an alternative account of how horror functions within the genre of natural history. As I hope to show, natural history, with its emphasis on sorting and categorization, does not merely create the conditions for horror. It also models a way of regarding horror with what I term “productive indifference.” Upon encountering horrifying scenes of torture and mutilation, the readers of Stedman's Narrative are not left paralyzed. Instead, they retain the emotional space necessary to plot out future courses of political action.
In this essay, I argue that the deep, almost rapturous piousness that the physician William Harvey and the poet Richard Blackmore exhibit in their works is built upon their conviction that the fluids that spurt from bodies in pain do so in accordance with nature's orderly rhythms. The wonder that Harvey and Blackmore feel at the beauty of a divinely ordered world, that is, cannot exist without their adoption of an indifferent attitude towards injury and death. By attending to the emotions that indifference enables or magnifies, I interpret indifference as an affective stance that prepares one to experience other forms of feeling instead of a standalone and all-encompassing state of being.
This essay examines the Crusoe trilogy against the backdrop of the trading guilds of eighteenth-century London, tracing how Crusoe employs similar strategies to those employed by the guilds to grow and maintain his membership. Contrary to Ian Watt’s influential claim that Crusoe stands as an emblem of individualism, I propose that Crusoe is more akin to the leader of a group or commune who builds and maintains filiative and affiliative relations through the use of coercion and violence. In the uncertain world that Daniel Defoe has crafted, the production and exchange of goods and the destruction of life and property all count as rational, economic decisions, for these decisions are all made in a bid to ensure the survival of the groups Crusoe belongs to.
Public Writing and Book Reviews
“What Reckoning with Slavery brings to literary-historical studies, then, is an archival practice that is at once historicist and reparative.”
“Minds in Motion refines common understandings of objectivity because the story it tells is not simply one of detachment or disavowal, but is also one of intense subjective engagement. To distance themselves from their objects of study, the writers Thell examines invest significant amounts of imaginative and affective labor only to fail, and as Thell points out, their self-conscious responses to these failures provide objectivity with its distinctive shape in the period.”
“In times like these, however, a tiny bit of proofreading can be a form of care, and more importantly, the start of a fruitful conversation about how to find and fix errors in one’s own work.”
Future Research
A New Account of the East Indies
A New Account of the East Indies is a digital project that attempts to make visible the deep global histories behind selected excerpts from Alexander Hamilton’s 1727 travel narrative of the same name. Hamilton was a Scottish merchant and ship-captain who spent several decades in Southeast Asia. His two-volume work, chock-full of discussions of the region’s indigenous cultures, is rarely read today. Working with the edition of Hamilton’s work housed in the National Library of Singapore, this multimedia project will present excerpts from Hamilton’s work in the context of the scholarship of Southeast Asian scholars as well as other eighteenth-texts about Southeast Asia located in the same archive. In doing so, it experiments with a local or regional mode of mapping out an international history.