Education
PhD, Duke University
About
Erica Fretwell examines nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. literature through the history of science and medicine, affect theory, and multiracial feminism. She is the author of Sensory Experiments: Psychophysics, Race, and the Aesthetics of Feeling (Duke University Press, 2020), shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Association (MSA) First Book Prize. You can hear more about her book on UAlbany's podcast The Short Version. Her current book project The Art of Slight Living, 1900/2000 examines how the rise of an-aesthetic technologies changed both modern and millennial literature's response to social conditions of anomie, in part by challenging ingrained assumptions about the centrality of agency to aliveness.
Dr. Fretwell's scholarship has appeared in the journals PMLA, Feminist Theory, American Literary History, American Literature, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and she has contributed chapters to the edited volumes Timelines of American Literature, The New Walt Whitman Studies, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food, and The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Body. She has published short-form criticism in Avidly, Post45: Contemporaries, and Al-Jazeera.
She has served on the editorial board of American Literature and, with Sarah Wasserman (Dartmouth) co-edits the book series Oxford Studies in American Literary History.