Susan Scott Parrish

Dr. Parrish's research addresses the interrelated issues of race, the environment, and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth up through the mid-twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her forthcoming book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, January 2017) examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US disaster of the 20^th century--the "Great Mississippi Flood" of 1927--took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), was a study of the 17th- and 18th-century Anglophone transatlantic networks and rhetorics of knowledge production on the subject of American nature. It was awarded both the Jamestown and Emerson Prizes. She regularly teaches a course in PitE called "Southern Natures: the Making and Unmaking of Races and Environments in the US South from Jefferson to Katrina."

Affiliation(s)

• Program in the Environment
• English Language and Literature
• LSA Honors Program

Field(s) of Study

• American Literature, with an emphasis on Southern and Caribbean Literature
• Environmental Literature
• Atlantic World, colonialism, slavery and postslavery
• Media Studies
• Science and Literature