Alison Sperling

Alison Sperling is currently an Assistant Professor of Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. She has previously held positions as a Junior Faculty Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden (2023), an International Postdoctoral Initiative Fellow (IPODI Fellow) at the Technische Universität Berlin (2020-2022), and a fellow at the ICI Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin (2018-2020).

She works on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, ecocriticism/the Anthropocene, science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, and contemporary art.

Sperling’s first book manuscript project tentatively titled Weird Modernism, situates ‘the Weird’ as both a genre, mode, and aesthetic foundational to modernist literature and culture, and ultimately argues that weirdness remains central as a mode of experience in the tumultuous contemporary moment. Although the Weird as a literary sub-genre of horror and the supernatural is often traced to its roots in pulp magazines like Weird Tales (1923-1954) and its most famous but troubling, racist writer, H. P. Lovecraft, this project attempts to think weirdness beyond Lovecraft and beyond the spectacularized, tentacular hybrid creatures that typically command attention in Weird fiction of the period. Weird Modernism, then, both situates weirdness as it takes shape in writers not typically considered under its banner – Carson McCullers, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes — while also developing the weird as a slippery category that also undermines literary periodization.

The project disrupts the too-neat distinction between the early 20th century ‘Old Weird’ (Lovecraft and the like) and the ‘New Weird’ emerging largely in the 21st century with writers and cultural producers like China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, Victor LaValle, Jordan Peele, Misha Green, and N.K. Jemisin. Drawing from previous work developing ‘weird theory’, the project develops a theory of weirdness in relation to theories of embodiment from feminist science studies, new materialism, Black studies, and in the broader environmental humanities, aiming to locate the weird as a broader attempt to name a confrontation with otherness and the indescribable.

Weirdness, or ‘The Weird’ as a literary genre is often reduced to its roots in pulp magazines like Weird Tales (1923-1954) and its most famous but troubling writer, H. P. Lovecraft. Yet at the same time, the weird, like the queer, has become famously slippery, impossible to reduce to definition or categorization. Is weirdness a mode, an aesthetic, or a genre? What is the weird encounter with that which is by definition impossible to describe or which forces a confrontation with the limits of description or representation?

This project, the foundation of Sperling’s first book manuscript Weird Modernisms, attempts to think the relation between historicizing weirdness through Lovecraft’s contempt and fear of gender, sexual, and racial difference by reading weird fiction through feminist and queer theory, disability studies, and black studies.

Locating the weird, a dreadful, temporally-obsessed, and fleshy mode that can be found not only in the supernatural tentacularity of Lovecraft, but in its pervasiveness into more ordinary places, may allow one to liberate the weird from its loathsome politics toward more emancipatory readings and possibilities. As a mode of confronting otherness, weirdness grapples with experiences and affects that cannot be reduced to the linguistic or otherwise representational modes. Herein lies an element of terror central to weirdness in a Lovecraftian mode, a confrontation with that which is never-knowable in full. Through queer and weird readings of modernist queer and women writers and writers of color, the project hopes to contribute to theories of weirdness by reckoning with the ways in which difference and otherness is formulated through the irreducible.

This research project, tentatively titled ‘Nuclear Afterlives’, examines the complex and conflicting residues of nuclear contamination, and some of nonhuman harborers of these residues. Following Sperling’s first book project on weird embodiment in modernism, this new project seeks to chart what (may be called) the weird across more contemporary  texts and landscapes. Currently this research is focused on radioactive boar, which have, according to popular journalism coverage world-wide, run rampant and free in areas that are now too toxic for human life to thrive. Through scientific and cultural studies of post-nuclear catastrophe sites like Fukushima and Chernobyl, including contemporary cultural texts about these disasters, as well as 21st century weird fiction exemplified by Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, this project seeks to examine the contours of contaminated life in the Anthropocene.

Against popular framings of resilience and adaptability, Sperling hopes to challenge the ways we think about toxic bodies and environments in an age when toxicity is not the exception but the rule. What do these (relatively) new forms of radioactive bodies (human and nonhuman, alive and not) enable us to understand about embodiment in the Anthropocene? How does the temporality of nuclear contamination reframe ecological time and potentially refuse the teleology of reproductive futurity?