Jennifer Gutman

In 2022-2023, Jennifer Gutman will be a sixth-year, joint-Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Media Analysis & Practice (CMAP). Her research and teaching interests include 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone literatures, history and theory of the novel, media studies, and environmental humanities. Her dissertation, End-Holocene Realism: The Contemporary Novel between Epochs, explores how contemporary realist novels respond to the distinct forms of crisis, risk, and uncertainty that characterize life at the onset of a new epoch. Novels by Ben Lerner, Tom McCarthy, Rachel Kushner, Teju Cole, Valeria Luiselli, Jesmyn Ward, Rumaan Alam, Annie Proulx, Richard Powers, and Rachel Cusk represent a distinctive fiction of our times that confronts how the underlying structures of ordinary experience—not merely the eventful expressions of a rioting planet—have become newly strange and vital.

A portion of Gutman’s project is forthcoming in the journal NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction and another portion received an award from the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) in 2022. Her work on digital storytelling is published in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. Gutman received a 2019-2020 Mellon Graduate Student Fellowship in Digital Humanities and a 2021-2022 Robert Penn Warren Environments Fellowship in conjunction with the Climate and Society Grand Challenge Initiative. In 2022, Gutman served as one of Vanderbilt’s official delegates at the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Egypt.