Turner, Cass
Kaplan 194
Tel: 310.825.4173 / Fax: 310.267.4339 / E-mail
Education
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 2018
B.A., University of Virginia, 2010
Interests
Eighteenth-century Anglophone literatures and cultures; Romanticism; history and theory of the novel; environmental humanities; feminist and queer theory; trans studies
About
Cass Turner specializes in the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain and the British Empire. In their first book project, The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form, Cass offers a new account of the rise of the modern novel in eighteenth-century England, arguing that the novel emerged in tandem with emergent thinking about the substance and function of waste. Across their research and teaching, Cass joins together attention to the specificity of literary forms with an awareness of how histories both shape and denaturalize the present.
Before coming to UCLA in 2023, Cass spent two years as an Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. Cass has also held postdoctoral fellowships at the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University and at the Humanities Research Center at Rice University.
Publications
Book (in progress):
The Salvaging Disposition: Waste and the Novel Form offers a new account of the rise of the modern novel in eighteenth-century England, arguing that the novel emerged in tandem with emergent thinking about the substance and function of waste. The Salvaging Disposition locates the emergence of a modern sense of waste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Baconian science and European colonialism began to conceive of the New World as an untapped spring of inexhaustible resources. As a part of this ideology of infinite growth, this period also witnessed a surge of interest in byproduct waste as a site of potential value. The book follows this salvaging impulse in eighteenth-century fiction. Rather than simply documenting the presence of waste materials in literary texts, The Salvaging Disposition demonstrates that the novel itself developed as a form for managing the waste generated by a rapidly shifting economy.
Selected Essays:
“Rot in Jail: Penal Infrastructure Before 1800.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 58.1 (2024): 81-99.
Interest Areas
• Ecocriticism / Environmental Humanities / Biopolitics
• Eighteenth-C. British Literature
• Sexuality & Gender Studies
• History and Theory of the Novel
