Dr. Travis Foster

In September, Dr. Foster gave a talk titled "Case Studies in Queer Ecology: Jewett to Freud" at Columbia University's Women & Society Seminar, arguing that Sarah Orne Jewett uses her 1884 novel, A Country Doctor, to apply Darwinian biology to Freudian questions about the diversity of human sexuality. And in November, he will present a work-in-progress, "Campus Novels and the Nation of Peers," at the University of Pennsylvania's Americanist Reading Group. The paper analyzes popular novels of student life published between the Civil War and World War I, arguing that this genre played a key role in reconciliation between the white North and South and the accompanying resubjugation of recently freed slaves.