Thomas Heise will reflect on the spatial imagination of U.S. literature in relation to changing modes of production, histories of uneven urban development and practices of segregation, ghettoization, zoning, redlining, and gentrification. His talk will read U.S. fiction for its narratives of place and its depictions of urban life, but also for how novels respond formally to the representational challenges that the urban environment poses as its spatiality changes and its social complexity multiplies in the wake of capital’s shifting needs and technologies. In what ways are gender, sexual, and racial identities spatially constituted in a work of literature? What is a novel’s geographical imaginary at the neighborhood, urban, national, or global level? His talk will attempt to address questions such as how human sociospatial practices are interwoven through time to create the geographies of the built environment as well as the geographies of memory, culture, and everyday life.

Thomas Heise is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Pennsylvania State University, Abington. His books include The Gentrification Plot: New York and the Postindustrial Crime Novel (Columbia 2022), published in the Literature Now series, and Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture (Rutgers 2011), which was part of the American Literatures Initiative. He is also the author of the lyrical narrative Moth (Sarabande 2013) and Horror Vacui: Poems (Sarabande 2006). His new book-project, Memory’s Fictions: Sites, Literature, and the Urban Imaginary, is concerned with urban redevelopment, personal and collective memory, and contemporary literature. His scholarly essays have appeared in, among other places, American Literary History, African American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Twentieth-Century Literature. His creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in SAND: Literature & Art, Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. Previously, he was an Associate Professor of American Literature at McGill University.