Susan (Scotti) Parrish

I am a Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. My research and teaching address this broad question: how have the making of races, environments and environmental knowledge occurred in overlapping ways since European colonization of the Americas began—and how have various media been enjoined to produce and question this process? My first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), which looked at letters, specimens, and the cross-racial American encounters they drew from, recast the scientific enlightenment in its actual Atlantic and colonial dimensions. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize. My next book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examined how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. It was awarded the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize (Honorable Mention) and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s biennial book prize (Honorable Mention) and translated into French (CNRS, 2019).

Recent work includes: the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (January 2023); The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment (2022, with Sarah Ensor); "Jordan Peele's Get Out and the Mediation of History" in Representations (Summer, 2021). I am currently writing a book provisionally titled "Out of the Woodwork: US Forests and Black Cultures, 1776-1940," which asks how Black artisans, artists, and writers responded to the country's dual reliance, during the first century and a half of its history, on forests and Black labor.

I am a recipient of fellowships from the NEH, the American Antiquarian Society, and Harvard’s Charles Warren Center, and am currently the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow in the Humanities at the Huntington Library (2024-25). I have served on the boards of Early American Literature, American Literature, and The Winterthur Portfolio and serve on the board of The Faulkner Journal. My teaching at UM has been recognized with the John Dewey Award, the University Undergraduate Teaching Award, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship.

I am currently the Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows.