Rachael DeWitt’s research focuses on 19th-century and later American literatures and cultures, especially as they intersect with perspectives drawn from environmental humanities and gender and sexuality studies. At a moment when ecological catastrophe demands fundamental changes in our modern modes of social reproduction, DeWitt’s work explores historically nonnormative forms of coexistence and interaction encoded in the literary archive that offer alternative models of sustainable feminist, queer, and ecological sociality.
Her current book project, “Disentanglement: Ecologies of Decline in Nineteenth-Century American Literature,” explores the transformational intimacies that emerge when we approach the quotidian ecologically. In this project, she assembles an archive of “eco-domestic” writers — including Thoreau, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Sarah Orne Jewett and Alice Dunbar Nelson — whose works present nongenerative processes like multispecies kinship and asexual reproduction as alternatives to the growth paradigm that entrenches our present-day environmental crises.
DeWitt’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, The Oxford Handbook of Thoreau, ESQ, Configurations and The Concord Saunter. In 2023 she earned a PhD in English from UC Davis. She holds an MA from the University of Utah in Environmental Humanities. Before arriving at Washington University, she was a lecturer in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program.