ba4588@princeton.edu
Branka Arsic specializes in literatures of the 19th century Americas and their scientific, philosophical, and religious contexts. She is the author of several essays and books, including Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (Harvard University Press, 2016), which was awarded the MLA James Russell Lowell Prize for the outstanding book of 2016. Arsic is currently completing a book entitled Ambient Life, Melville, Materialism and the Ethereal Enlightenment, a project for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. The book focuses on images of the elemental, vegetal, and animal that traverse Melville’s work as a means of investigating how he imagined the capacity of matter to move and transform.
Arsic will be a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Effron Center for the Study of America in Spring 2025. She will co-teach an undergraduate course with Sarah Rivett (English and American Studies) on Indigenous cosmologies.
