Jillian Sayre

The Work of Death in the Americas: Narrative, Necropolitics and the Historical Romance in the Post-Revolutionary Era

In my dissertation I argue that a structure of mourning, spoken through and effected by the historical romance, underlies the narratives of national culture and that the writing, consumption and preservation of these texts reveal not only the psychic life of community but also the material basis for that psychic life. My dissertation draws from work done in the fields of philosophy, historiography, literary criticism and theory, Latin American and American Studies and religious studies. The dissertation thus works in a comparative scope not only insofar as language or national literature but also in its breach of traditional disciplinary divides. I work under the co-direction of Martin Kevorkian in the English Department and Nic Shumway in Spanish and Portuguese.

"La Cabeza" by Niki at Missouri Botanical Gardens, photo by Jillian Sayre