Dr Hannah Murray PhD, FHEA

My monograph on whiteness and citizenship in early US literature, titled 'Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction', came out in May 2021. This book employs the concept of ‘liminal whiteness’ to examine fluid and precarious white citizenship in early nineteenth-century American fiction, from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J. Webb. It identifies and interrogates the repeated representation of white voices from the boundary between life and death: talking corpses, ghosts, ventriloquists, spiritualist mediums, monsters and non-human bodies. ‘Liminal whiteness’ explains this phenomenon. The book argues that in these transformative occurrences, the liminal figure’s voice—which is crucial in the construction of white identity—acts as an uncontainable and powerful articulation that questions, contests or negates early national and antebellum civic ideals. This project contributes to a growing body of critical whiteness scholarship concerned with the cultural construction of whiteness and citizenship in the early US, and which resonates with contemporary discussions of white cultural anxiety and fragility.

From this book project I am carrying out two additional research projects. The first is on Mary E Webb - Frank Webb's wife - an African American orator who toured the UK in 1856-7 and whose cross-racial performances influenced Webb's arguments on race in his 1857 novel 'The Garies and their Friends'. The second is a study racial transformation in 'postracial' US literature and culture after the election of Barack Obama, including film ('Get Out', 'Sorry to Bother You'), theatre ('Hamilton', 'An Octaroon'), and texts (Row, 'Your Face in Mine', Ruffin, 'We Cast a Shadow').

I have begun work on my next book, provisionally entitled 'No Such Place on the Maps: The Settler Utopia'. This project is a literary history of early and mid-nineteenth century American utopian texts. Over 200 utopian communities were founded in the US and Australia in the nineteenth century. However, little has been written on the small yet significant fictional corpus that predates the 1880s-90s utopian boom. In the nineteenth century, while political theorists and religious leaders established communes in new Western states, authors experimented with the utopian genre to imagine idealised societies in the US, South America, Australia, the Pacific, and Africa. This project utilises a critical race studies approach to nineteenth century utopian writing to argue that these texts articulate the racial politics of the period; they are shaped by and propagate white supremacy, which enacts a colonising approach to domestic and foreign soil and fashions utopias dependent on the segregation and replacement of non-white peoples.

In the early stages of this project I have written two short articles for 'The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation' on reading John Lithgow's 'Equality' (1802) in response to the economic, health and social crises of 2020-21. I have also embarked on a collaborative interdisciplinary project 'Visions of the Future Since 1800', which examines the legacy of nineteenth-century utopias and dystopias on today's imagination of a better future.