Faculty Fellows

Jack Bouchard is an Assistant Professor in the History Department at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. He teaches environmental history, with an emphasis on global and premodern perspectives. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, and served for two years as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Culture project at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Dr. Bouchard is interested in the histories of premodern maritime environments and foodways, and researches commercial fishing, island/coastal ecologies and changing global foodways in the 15th-16th centuries. He is currently working on his first book, Terra Nova: Food, Water and Work in an early Atlantic World, a history of the northwest Atlantic in the sixteenth century.

Kristin Grogan is an Assistant Professor in English at Rutgers University. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, labor history and theory, and gender and sexuality. She is finishing her first book, an account of the dynamic relationship between poetry and labor of various kinds—artisanal, mechanical, clerical, and reproductive work—with chapters on Langston Hughes, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and Lorine Niedecker. She is beginning a new project on feminist and queer poetics and anarchism in the USA, from Emma Goldman to now. Her writing has appeared in American Literature, Critical Quarterly, Social Text Online, and Post45; most recently, she edited, with David B. Hobbs, a special issue of Post45 Contemporaries on Bernadette Mayer. 

David Kurnick is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of Graduate Studies at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus on the history of the novel, narrative theory, sociology and literature, and sexuality and gender. He is the author of Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel (2012). The book examines the theatrical ambitions of major novelists (William Makepeace Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, James Joyce, and James Baldwin) better known for their narrative explorations of domestic and psychological interiors, tracing the novelistic aftermath of these failed theatrical projects to claim that these writers’ pioneering narrative techniques for representing interiority grew out of a frustrated appetite for collectivity. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in ELH, PMLA, Raritan, Victorian Studies, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Victorian Literature and Culture, The Henry James Review, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 3: 1820-1880, and Literature Compass.

Imani D. Owens is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her interests include African American and Caribbean literature, music, and performance. Her research has been supported by a Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellowship and an NEH funded residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Her work has appeared in the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry, Caribbean Literature in Transition, the Journal of Haitian Studies, MELUS, and small axe salon. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Turn the World Upside Down: Folk Culture, Imperialism, and U.S.-Caribbean Literature, which charts the connection between literary form and anti-imperialist politics in Caribbean and African American writing.

Dr. Ramenzoniis an environmental anthropologist specialized in human behavioral ecology, coastal communities, and marine and coastal policies. She is an Assistant Professor in Marine Policy at the Department of Human Ecology, Rutgers University. Through a mixed methods approach, she studies how socio-ecological factors shape human adaptation, the historical ecology of fishing societies, the impact of environmental uncertainty on decisions about resource use, and household nutrition in coastal environments. Her fieldwork includes communities from Eastern Indonesia, Kalimantan, Cuba, and the U.S. Dr. Ramenzoni has a strong commitment to applied science, co-participatory methods, and policy development.