Hsuan L. Hsu 徐旋

• 184 - Literature & the Environment

pronouns: he/they

ph.d., university of california, berkeley, 2004                   

a.b., harvard university, 1998

hsuan l. hsu joined the UC Davis faculty in 2008. His research areas include 19th and 20th-Century U.S. literature, Asian diasporic literature, race studies, cultural geography, sensory studies, and the environmental humanities. He is the author of Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization (NYU, 2015), The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020), and Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons, 2024). He is currently working on a book that considers how artists and writers have been experimenting with smell as a medium sensorial worldmaking.

Hsuan's recent courses have examined topics such as geographies of risk, transnational American literature, medical humanities, the aesthetics of atmosphere, the aesthetics of chemosensation, and race and realism. He serves (or has served) on the editorial and advisory boards of American Literature, Literary Geographies, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, American Literary Realism, Genre: Forms of Dicourse and Culture; EurAmerica, Multimodality & Society, Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics, and the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, the Executive Council of the American Literature Society, and the Executive Committees of the MLA's forum for Nineteenth-Century American Literature and for Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities; he is the book review editor for Senses and Society. His research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Davis Humanities Institute, the Andy Warhol Foundation's Arts Writers Program, Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the UC Humanities Research Institute, and the Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies.

Books & edited projects:

• Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury Object Lessons series, 2024)
• The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, general editor
• The Smell of Risk: Atmospheric Disparities and the Olfactory Arts (NYU, 2020)
• Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain, Asia, and Comparative Racialization. NYU, 2015.
• Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2010. 257pp.
• (ed.) Regionalism's Climates. Special issue of American Literary Realism, co-edited with Alison Maas and Rachael DeWitt, in progress.
• (ed.) Senses Without Subjects. Special issue of American Literature 95:3 (2023), co-edited with Erical Fretwell.
• (ed.) The Molecular Intimacies of Empire. Special Forum for the Journal of Transnational American Studies 13:1 (2022) co-edited with David Vázquez.
• (ed.) Atmospheric Literary Atmospheres. Guest editor. Themed essay cluster for the journal Literary Geographies (5:1) 2019.
• (intro, notes, and appendices) John Rollin Ridge, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta. Penguin, 2018.
• (ed.) Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. Broadview Press, 2016.
• (ed.) Representing Environmental Risk in the Landscapes of US Militarization. exhibition. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society/LMU Munich. 2014.
• (ed.) Circa 1898. Special Forum for the Journal of Transnational American Studies. Guest Editor. Vol.3, Issue 2 (2011).
• (ed.) Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton)'s Mrs. Spring Fragrance. Broadview Press, 2011.
• (ed.) American Literary Geographies: Spatial Practice and Cultural Production, 1500-1900. Co-edited with Martin Brückner. University of Delaware Press, 2007.
• (ed.) Asian American Subgenres, 1853-1945, special double issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall & Winter 2006)
• (ed.) Race, Environment, and Representation. special double issue of Discourse 29:2-3 (Spr and Fall, 2007), co-edited with Mark Feldman.

Articles and Essays

• "Twain's Olfactory Gags: Realist Atmospheres, Fermentation, and the Necrobiome" American Literary Realism, forthcoming.
• "Olfactory Futures in BIPOC Speculative Fiction." In Literature and the Senses, eds. Annette Kern-Stahler and Elizabeth Robertson (Oxford, forthcoming).
• "Skunk: Olfactory Violence and Morbid Speculation" (co-authored with Jean-Thomas Tremblay and Aleesa Cohene). Law and the Senses: Smell, ed. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihailapoulos et al. (University of Westminster Press, 2023).
• "Race, Urban Heat, and the Aesthetics of Thermoception." American Literary History 35:2 (summer 2023) 769-94.
• "The Materials of Art and the Legacies of Colonization: A conversation with Beatrice Glow and Sandy Rodriguez," Journal of Transnational American Studies 13:1 (2022), with David Vázquez.
• "Olfactory Politics in Black Diasporic Art." In Olfactory Art and the Political in an Age of Resistance, eds. Debra Parr and Gwenn-Ael Lynn (Routledge, 2021).
• "Smell, History, and Heritage." Conversation with William Tullett, Inger Leemans, Stephanie Weismann, Cecilia Bembibre, Melanie Kiechle, Duane Jethro, Anna Chen, Xuelei Huang, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Mark Bradley, American Historical Review 127:1 (Mar 2022) 261-309.
• "Colonial and Anti-Black Legacies of Fragrance and Deodorization," Venti Journal 2:2 (Winter 2022).
• "Un-Collected: Remapping Sui Sin Far/Edith Maude Eaton" (co-authored with Edlie Wong). In Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850-1930, eds. Julia Lee and Josephine Lee (Cambridge UP, 2021).
• "Beatrice Glow and the Botanical Intimacies of Empire." Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 7:1 (Spr 2021).
• "Post-Apocalyptic Geographies and Structural Appropriation" (co-authored with Bryan Yazell). Routledge Companion to Transnational American Studies. eds. Nina Morgan, Alfred Hornung, Takayuki Tatsumi (Routledge, 2019).
• "Boris Raux, Olfactory Narcissism, and Environmental Risk," Senses & Society 14:1 (Mar 2019) 15-30.
• "Paleo-Narratives and White Atavism, 1898-2015." ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (2019).
• "Smelling Setting." Modernism/Modernity Print Plus 3:1 (Mar 9, 2018) online.
• "Literary Atmospherics." Literary Geographies 3:1 (2017) 1-5.
• "Olfactory Art, Trans-Corporeality, and the Museum Environment." Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 4:1 (Winter 2016) 1-24.
• "Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice." American Literature 88:4 (Dec 2016) 787-814
• "The Smell of Risk." In Peter de Cupere: Scent in Context, Olfactory Art (Brussels: Stockmans, 2016) 87-91.
• "Mark Twain...and Zombies!" Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life 16:3 (2016) online.
• "Literary Topographies and the Scales of Environmental Justice." ELN (English Language Notes) 52:1 (2014).
• "Gravity: A 3D Movie About 3D Movies." Avidly (Nov 2013).
• "Sitting in Darkness: Mark Twain and America's Asia." American Literary History 25:1 (Spr 2013) 69-84.
• "The Invasion of Echo Park." Boom: A Journal of California 2:3 (2012) 86-89.
• "Guahan (Guam), Literary Emergence, and the American Pacific in Homebase and from unincorporated territory." American Literary History 24:2 (Summer 2012): 281-307.
• "Fatal Contiguities: Metonymy and Environmental Justice." New Literary History 42:1 (Winter 2011) 147-68.
• "Asian American Chronotopes and the American West." In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Ed. Nicolas Witschi. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 145-60.
• "Mika Rottenberg's Productive Bodies." Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 25:2 (2010) 40-73.
• "A Connecticut Yankee in the Court of Wu Chih Tien: Mark Twain and Wong Chin Foo." Common-Place: The Interactive Journal of Early American Life 11:1 (Oct 2010).
• "Vagrancy, Comparative Racialization, and Civil Death in Huckleberry Finn." American Literature 81:4 (Dec 2009) 687-717.
• "The Dangers of Biosecurity: The Host and the Geopolitics of Outbreak." Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009).
• "Health Media and Global Inequalities." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 138:2 (Spring 2009), 20-30.
• "New Regionalisms: Literature and Uneven Development." In A Companion to the Modern American Novel. Ed. John T. Matthews (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 218-39. 
• Race, Environment, and Representation. Co-edited with Mark Feldman. Special issue of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29:2-3 (Spring and Fall 2007).
• "Biopower, Bodies...the Exhibition, and the Spectacle of Public Health." Co-authored with Martha Lincoln. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 29:1 (Winter 2007): 15-34.
• Wong Chin Foo's Periodical Writing and Chinese Exclusion. Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 83-105.
• Asian American Subgenres, 1853-1945. Part I. Part II. Guest editor. Special double issue of Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 39:3-4 (Fall/Winter 2006).
• "Racial Privacy, the L.A. Ensemble Film, and Paul Haggis's Crash." Film Criticism 31:1 (Fall/Winter 2006): 132-56.
• "Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong's Fixer Chao. Modern Fiction Studies 52:3 (Fall 2006): 675-704.
• "Who Wears the Mask?" Review Essay. minnesota review 67 (Fall 2006): 169-75.
• "Literature and Regional Production." American Literary History 17:1 (Spring 2005): 36-69.
• "Authentic Recreations: Ideology, Practice, and Regional History along Buena Park's Entertainment Corridor," in True West: Authenticity in the American West, 304-27, eds. William Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2004).
• "Regarding Mimicry: Race and Visual Ethics in Invisible Man." Arizona Quarterly 59:2 (Summer 2003): 107-40.
• "War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville's Battle-Pieces." Nineteenth Century Studies 16 (2002): 51-71.
• "Democratic Expansionism in 'Memoirs of Carwin.'" Early American Literature 35:2 (Fall 2000): 137-56.