Curriculum Vita

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Susan Scott Parrish

Department of English                                                                           sparrish@umich.edu
University of Michigan                                                                          (734) 649-7294
3164 Angell Hall                                                                                   
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
                                                                            
                                   

Academic Employment

Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature
University of Michigan, January 1999-present

 

Jointly appointed with the Program in the Environment, 2006-2009

Education

 

Stanford University
Ph.D., Department of English, 1998

University of California, Berkeley
M.A., Department of Rhetoric, 1990

Princeton University
B.A., Magna Cum Laude, 1986
Major in English
Elected to Phi Beta Kappa Society
                       

Publications

 

Book  
American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/UNCP, 2006). Awarded the Jamestown Prize (2005) and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize (2006). Available here

 

Articles and Chapters in Collections
Introduction to Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705) to be re-issued by OIEAHC/UNCP in 2007.

“William Byrd II and the Crossed Languages of Science, Satire, and Empire in British America” in eds., Ralph Bauer (University of Maryland) and José  Antonio Mazzotti (Harvard), Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities (forthcoming, OIEAHC/UNCP, 2007).

“Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge” in eds., James Delbourgo (McGill) and Nicholas Dew (McGill), Atlantic Knowledges (forthcoming, Routledge Press, 2007).

“Environment, Knowledge, and Slave Portraiture in Colonial Surinam: Considering Two William Blake Engravings in Stedman’s 1796 Narrative” in eds., Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (University of Chicago) and Angela Rosenthal (Dartmouth), Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1660-1890) (collection under submission University of Chicago Press).

“Scientific Discourse” in ed. Kevin J. Hayes, Oxford Handbook of Early American Literature (forthcoming Oxford University Press, 2007).

Biographical and Bibliographical Essay on “William Byrd II” for The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume I, 4th Edition (2002).

“Women’s Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America,” Early American Literature 37.2 (UNCP, July 2002), 195-238.

“The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Vol. LIV, No. 3 (July 1997), 475-514 (lead article).  This article was awarded the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Richard L. Morton Award for 1997 and an Honorable Mention for the South-Eastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Percy Adams Prize for 1998. Available here

 

Book Reviews and Review Essays
Review Essay: “The ‘Hemispheric Turn’ in Colonial American Studies,” Early American Literature 40:3 (2005) 545-553. Available here

Review of Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (U of Pennsylvania P, 2005) forthcoming in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2006).

Review of William Merrill Decker, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (UNCP, 1998) in Modern Philology 99.3 (February 2002).

Review of Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (UTP, 1998) in The University of Toronto Quarterly 69.1 (December 1999).

 

Academic Honors and Awards

   
2006 
 Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize for American Curiosity.  This prize is awarded by the Phi Beta Kappa Society “for scholarly
  studies that contribute significantly to interpretations of the intellectual and cultural condition of humanity. Established in 1960, this award may recognize work in the fields of history, philosophy and religion. These fields are conceived in sufficiently broad terms to permit the inclusion of appropriate work in related fields such as anthropology and the social sciences.” Avilable Here
   
2006-2009 Graham Environmental Sustainability Institute, University of Michigan, three year fellowship
   
2006  Teaching with Technology Initiative Grant, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan
   
2006   Instructional Development Fund Grant, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching, University of Michigan
   
2005  Jamestown Prize for American Curiosity. The prize is awarded by the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation, University of North Carolina Press, the College of William and Mary, and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. Avilable Here
   
2003  Stephen Botein Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society
  1. Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History Fellowship, Harvard University
  2. National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship
   
2001   Horace H. Rackham Faculty Fellowship, University of Michigan
   
1998 Honorable Mention for the South-Eastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies’ Percy Adams Prize for W&MQ article
   
1998  Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture’s Richard L. Morton Award for W&MQ article
   
1996-1997  Thomas and Carolyn Killefer Fellowship
   
1995-1996  Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship
   
1990-1995  Stanford University Fellowship
   
1989-91   Jacob K. Javits Fellowship

 

Conference Presentations and Invited Lectures

 

“Zora Neal Hurston and the Hurricane of 1928” at the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment conference, Spartanburg, SC, June 12-16, 2007.

“Robert Beverly’s Atlantic History” at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/Society of Early Americanists Conference, Williamsburg, VA, June 7-10, 2007.

“Environment, Knowledge, and Slave Portraiture in Colonial Surinam: Considering Two William Blake Engravings in Stedman’s 1796 Narrative” at the Johnson Society Annual Conference, Indiana University, May 12-13, 2006 (Invited lecture).

Presentation for panel addressing “Science and Sensibility in the American Enlightenment” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Montreal, March 30-April 2, 2006.

“The Authority of Local Knowledge in British Transatlantic Science” at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference, Santa Barbara, CA, June, 2005.

“Fitting Time to Place: Almanacs in the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods” at the Society of Early Americanists Fourth Biennial Conference, Old Town, Alexandria, VA, March 31-April 2, 2005.

“Representing New World Africans within the Cultures of Natural History” at “Invisible Subjects? Slave Portraiture in the Circum-Atlantic World (1660-1890),” Dartmouth College, Center for Transcultural Visual Studies, October 22-23, 2004 (Invited lecture).

“African Magi, Slave Poisoners,” at “In Comparable Americas: Colonial Studies after the Hemispheric Turn,” The University of Chicago and the Newberry Library, April 28-30, 2004 (Invited lecture).

“Colonial and Early National Almanacs,” the American Antiquarian Society Fellows Seminar, 2003.

“Colonial Natural History,” American Society for Literature and the Environment Conference, Boston, June, 2003.

“Nature and Knowledge in Colonial American Slave Societies,” Junior Faculty Forum Lecture, University of Michigan, March, 2003.

“The Humours of New World Science” at the History of Science Society Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, November, 2002.

“Slave Epistemologies: Poisons, Cures, and the Un-Pastoral” at “Bacon to Bartram: Early American Inquiries into the Natural World,” an Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Special Conference, March, 2002, and at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History Seminar, Harvard University, February, 2002.

“Sagacity and Secrets, or, How Colonials Framed Indigenous Knowledge of the New World” at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture Conference, Glasgow, July 2001.

“Colonial Women, Knowledge, and the Importation of Science Texts and Fables” at the Society of Early Americanists Conference, March 2001.

“Poisoned Knowledge and the Curious Body in America” for the Early Modern Colloquium, University of Michigan, November 2000.

“Curious Women and Environmental Signs in Eighteenth-Century British America” at the Mid-Western American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, November 2000.

“Natural Gifts from British America” at the Citadel Conference on the South, April, 2000.

“Unsettling Curiosity: William Byrd’s Histories of the Dividing Line” at the American Studies Association Conference, October, 1999.

“Female Curiosity in British America” at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Conference, June 1999.

“’There Is in the Little Box’: Natural Gifts and Specimens from the British American Colonies” at the Modern Language Association Conference, December 1998.

“The Performance of Curiosity in Colonial British America” at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, April 1997.

“Homosocial Science and the Marsupiale Americanum” at Mid-Western American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference, October 1995.

 

Panels Organized
Organized two panels at the Society of Early Americanists Conference (Alexandria, March, 2005) on “Geography, Genre, and Communal Identity” and “Native Places and the Place of Natives in the American Settler Imagination.” 

Workshop organizer and chair at the “Beyond Colonial Studies: An Inter-American Encounter” at Brown University (November, 2004) on “Epistemologies and Environments in the Colonial Americas.”

Organized panel at the OIEAHC Conference (Glasgow, July, 2001) on “Environmental ‘Improvement’ and Classification: Local and Transatlantic Perspectives.”

 

Respondent on Conference Panel
Respondent to musicologist Cynthia Schmidt’s documentary on circum-Atlantic African musical retentions, “The Language You Cry In,” at the “Rhythms of the Atlantic World: Rituals and Remembrance” Conference organized by the Atlantic Studies Initiative, UM, March 16-17, 2005.

One of a panel of respondents to the recent publication of Julie Ellison’s Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago, 1999) at the Society of Early Americanists Conference, April, 2003.

Respondent for panel, “Science and Letters in the Colonial Americas” at the Society of Early Americanists Conference, April, 2003.

 

Professional Activities and Service

 

Executive Committee, MLA “American Literature to 1800” Division, 2007-2012

Contributing Editor for Heath Anthology of American Literature, Fourth Edition (included biographical and bibliography essays on William Byrd II).

Reviewer of applications for National Endowment for the Humanities (since 2001) in the category of American History.

Reviewer of manuscripts for William and Mary Quarterly, Nineteenth-Century Literature.

Reviewer for third-year review for the History Department, George Washington University, 2005; appointment of tenured Professor in Early American Literature, English Department, Yale University.

 

Departmental Service
Conference Organizer and Fundraiser, “Responding to the Natural World: A Conference in Honor of John Knott,” April 7-8, 2006; see this for information
Director, Honors Program, 2005-2008
Member of the Executive Committee (1999-2000, Fall 2000, Fall 2002, 2004-2005, 2006-2008)
Search Committee for Fiction Position (Winter 1999 and 2003-4)
Search Committee for Multiple Position Hire (2004-2005, 2006-2007)
Undergraduate Curriculum Committee (Winter 1999)
Job Placement Officer (2002-2003, 2003-2004, 2004-2005)

 

Teaching and Advising
Current Graduate Examinations and Dissertation Committees
Sabia Ahmad (English)
Rebecca Brannon (History)
Katie Cangany (History)
Erika Gasser (History and Women’s Studies)
Gavin Hollis (English)
Lauren La Fauci (English) (Chair)
Cephas Sekhar (English) (Chair)
Laura Williamson (English)

 

Completed Dissertations, Committee Member
Joe LaSala, Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, Michelle Craig (all History); Holly Dugan (English and Women’s Studies)

 

Courses Taught
William Faulkner
Thesis Writing Workshop, undergraduate Honors students
American Literature to 1830: Key Texts (at the Undergraduate and Graduate Level)
Transatlantic Epistemologies: 1584-1763 (Graduate Course)
True Histories of the Atlantic World, 1600-1800 (Graduate Course)
American Novels in Critical and Historical Contexts
The American Novel
The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

 

Independent Studies
Charles Gragg, Graduate student, School of Education (Fall, 2002)
Laura Williamson, PhD Candidate, Dept. of English (Winter, 2003)
Lauren La Fauci, PhD Candidate, Dept. of English (Winter, 2003)
Nicole Wexner, Undergraduate, Major in English (Winter, 2004)

 

Membership

Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Society of Early Americanists
History of Science Society
American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
American Literature Association
Modern Language Association