Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Scholars join English & Creative Writing

Six postdoctoral scholars have joined Dartmouth's Society of Fellows, bringing to 15 the number of junior fellows mentored by senior fellows in a close-knit intellectual community that integrates research with classroom experience.

The Department of English & Creative writing will be home to two of the newly appointed junior fellows, James A. Godley and Nicholas Rinehart.

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James A. Godley received his PhD from The University at Buffalo, SUNY. His dissertation is titled, "Against Infinite Grief: Mourning and Speculative Invention in Postbellum American Literature."

Godley's work explores mourning as a process of retroactive invention in literary and philosophical works. His current book project, "Unthinkable Loss: Mourning and the Object of Speculation in Nineteenth Century U.S. Literature," examines how slavery, the privatization of mortality, and the Civil War brought vast changes to the ritual structure and philosophy of death in the 19th century, impelling American literary authors to find new ways of mapping speculative futures for those who would otherwise have been condemned to a futureless end. Combining literary-historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic perspectives, the project will constitute the first of a two-volume set devoted to the problem of "infinite grief" in modern and contemporary U.S. literature. Godley's publications include Inheritance in Psychoanalysis, a co-edited anthology of theoretical interventions into biological, anthropological, aesthetic, and clinical notions of inheritance, and an article on the critique of finitude in Hegel and Lacan in Angelaki. Additionally, he has a soon-to-be-published essay on Melville's Confidence Man and authoritarian populism in Postmodern Culture and another essay that explores the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott's notion of potential space as a concept of afterlife in the anthology, A Step Closer to Heaven.

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Nicholas Rinhart recieved his PhD from Harvard University. His dissertation is titled,  "Narrative Events:  Slavery, Testimony, and Temporality in the Afro-Atlantic World."

Rinehart's research and teaching focus broadly on Black literature in the Americas and the comparative history of Atlantic slavery. His first book project, Narrative Events: Reading Slave Testimony in the Afro-Atlantic World, examines enslaved testimonial practices across historical periods, colonial geographies, and expressive forms—including legal complaints, mystical visions, epistolary writings, folk ethnographies, and lyric poems. Harnessing the resources of comparative literature, historical anthropology, and queer studies, it reorients prevailing conceptions of literary-historical time in the study of slavery. His research has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Winterthur Portfolio, with additional essays in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography and Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright. He is also a co-editor, along with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler.