Position Title
Associate Professor of English
Sal Nicolazzo specializes in the literature of the eighteenth-century British Empire and Atlantic world. Their first book, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police, argued that Restoration and eighteenth-century vagrancy law across the British Empire reveals the narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices that shaped the purview and scope of policing in the Anglo-American legal sphere before the establishment of the modern police force.
Their current research examines how practices and fantasies of material duration and preservation intersect with eighteenth-century racial capitalism's speculative futures. This project traces the aesthetic work of materials that seem to resist, exceed, or work in contradistinction to the mortality, fragility, and span of human life: materials like silver and porcelain that last far longer than human bodies, materials like sugar that extended the “life” of foods into the future, and materials like dyes and inks that were used to render color permanent and lasting. These materials are imbricated in emerging and accelerating modes of racial-capitalist future-making that were, in the eighteenth century, frequently figured as immaterial: finance and credit, value, speculation, and property. This project asks how we might understand racial capitalism as unevenly distributing futurity and material duration--rendering some populations vulnerable to premature death while promising others access to legacies that far exceed the human lifespan--and seeks, in literary and material aesthetics, traces of resistance to this uneven distribution of time itself.
In addition to this project, they are currently coediting Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Trans Lives.
Prior to coming to UC Davis, they taught in the Literature Department at UC San Diego.
- PhD, University of Pennsylvania (2014)
- Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police (2021), Yale University Press.
- “Trans/Atlantic Origin Stories: The Transmasculinity Narrative in the Anglophone Atlantic Eighteenth Century,” The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature (2024).
- “Equiano’s Shipwreck: Insurance, Risk and Peril in Plantationocene Oceans,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 63.3-4 (2022), 275-94.
- “Another 1987, or, Whiteness and Eighteenth-Century Studies,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 33.2 (2020-21), 233-248.
- “Lyric Without Subjects and Law Without Persons: Vagrancy, Police Power, and the Lyrical Tales,” Criticism 60.2 (2018): 149-170.
- "Henry Fielding's The Female Husband and the Sexuality of Vagrancy," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.4 (2014): 335-353. (published under the name Sarah Nicolazzo)
- "Reading Clarissa's 'Conditional Liking:' A Queer Philology," Modern Philology 112.1 (2014): 205-225. (published under the name Sarah Nicolazzo)