Jennifer Wenzel
Associate Professor, English, Comparative Literature, MESAAS, Columbia University
Jennifer Wenzel's areas of interest include: postcolonial theory and decolonization; African and South Asian literatures; environmental humanities; energy studies. Wenzel received her B.A. in English and History from Austin College in 1990; her M.A. in English from Indiana University in 1992; and her Ph.D. in English/Ethnic and Third World Literatures from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998. Her book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her essays on postcolonial theory, ecocriticism and environmental humanities, memory studies, postconsumerism, petrocultures, and African and South Asian literatures, have appeared in journals including Alif, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA, Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture, Research in African Literatures, and Resilience. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies. She is currently at work on two book manuscripts: "Reading for the Planet: World Literature and Environmental Crisis," and "Contrapuntal Environmentalisms: Nature, North and South." She has co-edited with Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger an anthology of keywords on energy, Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment, forthcoming from Fordham University Press.
Working Group Affiliations
The Rural-Urban Interface: Gender and Poverty in Ghana and Kenya, Statistics and Stories