Susan (Scotti) S Parrish

University of Michigan, English, Faculty Member

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I am a Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. My research and teaching address this broad question: how have the making of races, environments and environmental knowledge occurred in overlapping ways since European colonization of the Americas began—and how have various media been enjoined to produce and question this process? My first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), which looked at letters, specimens, and the cross-racial American encounters they drew from, recast the scientific enlightenment in its actual Atlantic and colonial dimensions. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize. My next book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examined how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. It was awarded the MLA's James Russell Lowell Prize (Honorable Mention) and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment’s biennial book prize (Honorable Mention) and translated into French (CNRS, 2019).

Recent work includes: the Norton Critical Edition of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (January 2023); The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment (2022, with Sarah Ensor); "Jordan Peele's Get Out and the Mediation of History" in Representations (Summer, 2021). I am currently working on a book-length study, provisionally titled "Into the Woodwork: Black American Life and Its Forest Materials."

I am a recipient of fellowships from the Huntington Library, the NEH, the American Antiquarian Society, Harvard’s Charles Warren Center and UM's Institute for the Humanities. I have served on the boards of Early American Literature, American Literature and the Winterthur Portfolio and serve on the board of The Faulkner Journal and American Literary History. My teaching at UM has been recognized with the John Dewey Award, the University Undergraduate Teaching Award, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professorship.

I am currently the Chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows.
Phone: (734)649-7294
Address: 3187 Angell Hall
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48109

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Papers by Susan (Scotti) S Parrish

Epistemologies of the Coast: from Columbus to Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black

Iperstoria , 2022

In this essay, I put two distinct periods in conversation, namely the modernizing era (1500-1850)... more In this essay, I put two distinct periods in conversation, namely the modernizing era (1500-1850) and the recent present, to offer a very brief history of an Atlantic coastal imaginary over the long durée. I first look at how the European iconography of Atlantic coastal encounters developed in the early modern period, redefining the geography and the epistemology of divine-human relations and participating in the invention of racial difference. I then look at how a contemporary Black historical novelist, Esi Edugyan, working in the genres of the neoslave narrative and the scientific adventure tale in her 2018 novel Washington Black, uses circumatlantic coastal locations to imagine the making of a Black naturalist-a naturalist who, importantly, shifts the definitions of knowledge, race, and the sacred he has inherited from imperial British science. The essay thus offers two glances at coastal transformations, the first at European promises of Atlantic expansion offering divine redemption, and the second at a contemporary story, written during a time of rising coastal peril, of how historical Black riskinformed knowledge might help us reimagine our relation to the nonhuman world now.

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Mediating Disaster, or A History of the Novel

Critical Disaster Studies, 2021

Susan Scott Parrish posits the novel as a genre uniquely capable of communicating the inherently... more Susan Scott Parrish posits the novel as a genre uniquely capable of communicating the inherently social and complex risks of disaster. Focusing on London’s bubonic plague of 1665 and Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi in 2005, she argues that unlike the official and scientific assessments they complement, novels help readers to understand how disaster feels.

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Introduction to Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment

Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment, 2022

Overview of terms, history of US ecocriticism, and chapter overview

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Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey

The Cambridge Companion to American Literature and the Environment, 2022

In “Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey,” Susan Scott Parrish traces the... more In “Tender Woods: Looking for the Black Outdoors with Dawoud Bey,”
Susan Scott Parrish traces the emergence of “a Black environmental imaginary” (Carolyn Finney’s term) simultaneously attentive and irreducible to the legacies of harm of settler colonialism, chattel slavery/the plantation, and environmental injustice. She demonstrates how photographer Bey tinkers with specific visual technologies – as well as the technology of vision itself – in order to alter his audience’s understanding of racialized bodies, natural spaces, and the historical and ideological relationship between the two. Attuning our attention to the ethics of tenderness – as noun and verb and adjective, as site of vulnerability and source of mutual aid, as a practice of vision and care, as “the act of offering,” as the soreness after a blow – Parrish offers a heuristic for understanding both the histories and the many possible futures of Black environmentality.

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Jordan Peele's Get Out and the Mediation of History

Representations, 2021

spoke about the relation of his film Get Out to two of its precursors, Rosemary's Baby (1968) and... more spoke about the relation of his film Get Out to two of its precursors, Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Stepford Wives (1975): these ''were movies that did with gender what I wanted to do with race.'' 1 Up to a point, Get Out strikingly resembles these earlier films. In all three, the threat of obsolescence makes a once powerful but now aging group zero in on a young, desirable victim. The anxious conspirators may be musty elders afraid of the upheavals of sixties youth culture, or male biotech executives alarmed by second-wave feminism, or, in Peele's film, aging white elites who covet youthful Black embodiment. In each film, these conspirators train one member of an intimate relationship to act as a lure for his or her lover while those in control aim to convert the victim's body into the means for the group's perpetuation of its dominance. Peele, however, makes a significant innovation when he substitutes a young Black male victim-turned-hero in the slot previously occupied by the young white female victim. In doing so, Peele seems to address and potentially satisfy fans of the thriller and horror genres, including the often sidelined Black fans of these genres, in a whole new way. 2 While Peele may not, in public interviews, in his director's commentary, or in his selections for the ''Art of the Social Thriller'' film series at which he introduced his own film, cite earlier Black examples of these filmic genresfrom Richard C. Kahn's Son of Ingagi (1940), to William Crain's Blacula (1972), to James Bond III's Def by Temptation (1990)-Get Out, like these, signifies on Hollywood racial tropes and confronts the premise that ''black history is black horror.'' 3 Moreover, Peele draws, throughout his film, on the centuries-long Black literary tradition of slave and neoslave narratives, especially as these deploy Gothic and supernatural elements. When, for a b s t r a c t In its attention to the undead state of American slavery, Jordan Peele's film Get Out

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Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History Introduction

The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across sev... more The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, which covered nearly thirty thousand square miles across seven states, was the most destructive river flood in U.S. history. Due to the speed of new media and the slow progress of the flood, this was the first environmental disaster to be virtually experienced on a mass scale. As it moved from north to south down an environmentally and technologically altered valley, inundating plantations and displacing more than half a million people, the flood provoked an intense and lasting cultural response. The Flood Year 1927 draws from newspapers, radio broadcasts, political cartoons, vaudeville, blues songs, poetry, and fiction to show how this event took on public meanings.
Americans at first seemed united in what Herbert Hoover called a “great relief machine,” but deep rifts soon arose. Southerners, pointing to faulty federal levee design, decried the attack of Yankee water. The condition of African American evacuees in “concentration camps” prompted pundits like W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells to warn of the return of slavery to Dixie. And environmentalists like Gifford Pinchot called the flood “the most colossal blunder in civilized history.” Susan Scott Parrish examines how these and other key figures—from entertainers Will Rogers, Miller & Lyles, and Bessie Smith to authors Sterling Brown, William Faulkner, and Richard Wright—shaped public awareness and collective memory of the event.
The crises of this period that usually dominate historical accounts are war and financial collapse, but The Flood Year 1927 enables us to assess how mediated environmental disasters became central to modern consciousness.
The immediate goal of the book is for readers to appreciate what a major cultural phenomenon this flood was. More expansively, Parrish uses this signal case study to encourage readers to meditate on a more elusive, abstract but increasingly important issue, namely: how do disasters become meaningful? How do—and how should—humans communicate with themselves about politically charged eco-catastrophes? Do certain media entail better, or more productive, or more democratic, epistemologies of crisis? What can we learn from 1927 about how to make transformative expression, and knowledge, out of disaster today and in the future? For the shape this disaster took—with extreme weather events, high waters, a faultily designed infrastructure, and poor racially marked evacuees struggling in a southern resource frontier—is one which increasingly characterizes the Global South in a present and future era of Global Climate Change.

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Faulkner and the Outer Weather of 1927

Published in American Literary History in 2012, this article places Faulkner's The Sound and the ... more Published in American Literary History in 2012, this article places Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury in the context of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, how it was experienced by black and white southerners and how it resulted from northerners' resource extraction of Faulkner's region. Parrish argues that Faulkner understood the '27 flood to represent a form of modern catastrophic experience that demanded a commensurate formal experimentation.

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Zora Neale Hurston and the Environmental Ethic of Risk

A chapter in Joni Adamson and Kimberly Ruffin’s "American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship:... more A chapter in Joni Adamson and Kimberly Ruffin’s "American Studies, Ecocriticism, and Citizenship: Thinking and Acting in the Local and Global Commons," Parrish's essay explores how Zora Neale Hurston’s anthropological field work amongst the African-American and Afro-Caribbean laborers who deforested, drained and planted the last frontiers of the deep South in the 20s and 30s had given her an awareness of the exceptional insights these laborers possessed about the risks inhering in the biosphere, and the intensification of these risks due to drastic human interventions. Contrary to environmentalists and ecologists working in her day who interpreted Darwin conservatively and focused on Nature’s “equilibrium,” Hurston tapped into a reservoir of empirical knowledge about unpredictable biological change, and group cultural responses to the risks of living and working within this unpredictability. She wove this awareness of “chance and change” throughout her entire corpus decades before it became the new ecological paradigm in the 1970s. Finally, this chapter places Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God within this environmental and intellectual history context.

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Embodying African Knowledge in Colonial Surinam

Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, 2013

Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths

Because Ligon’s 1657 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados was the most comprehensive ... more Because Ligon’s 1657 True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados was the most comprehensive study of the English Caribbean published in the seventeenth century, and thus a key document recording how England, West Africa and the West Indies were transformed by slave-worked sugar colonies, historians have tended to read Ligon ‘straight’ as a rare repository of factual information, while literary historians read him proleptically—that is, as an early apologist for a future global British empire. By contrast, Parrish sees Ligon, a downwardly mobile former Royalist who wrote his History in a London debtor’s prison, as someone for whom the extreme yoking of economic opportunity to political oppression in Barbados made it the key locale in which to study the evolving British political question of social organization. In short, his History was a self-conscious, rhetorically crafted, emblem-filled response to Hobbes’ Leviathan, in which Ligon urged that working out the puzzle of the colonial Caribbean was integral to the health of the commonwealth itself.

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American Curiosity sample

In "America Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World" (UNCP,... more In "America Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World" (UNCP, 2006), Parrish studies the networks and rhetorics of knowledge- and meaning-production surrounding the natural world in the Americas from the era of contact up to the late eighteenth century. Beginning with a cache of letters sent by British travelers and colonials to the Royal Society of London, describing the flora, fauna and indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere, Parrish traces the origins of these letters in face-to-face interactions between elite colonial men and various interlocutors, including Indians, enslaved and free Africans, female colonials and non-elite Englishmen. She also shows how this colonial knowledge became codified once in London, in books, journal publications and museum repositories. Challenging the traditional view of the Scientific Revolution as centered in urban European investigation, Parrish argues that the American environment—and those who knew it well—in many ways drove the development and influenced the social configuration of Enlightenment natural history. American nature was such a great curiosity to Europeans that it could remake the very terms of curiosity itself. Of equal interest to herin the book was how the process of European colonization, with its complex movements and displacements of humans and biota, remade what nature was—and what it meant—to peoples once separated by the Atlantic basin.

The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World

Parrish relates how the opossum was extracted from nature and constructed as a subject of early ... more Parrish relates how the opossum was extracted from nature and constructed as a subject of early modern and Enlightenment natural history, with continental Europe serving as a preface to the central concern, the 17th- and 18th-century British and British-American discursive and historical shifts--about America, maternity, and nature--present in pictures and texts representing the opossum.

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The "Hemispheric Turn" in Colonial American Studies

Early American Literature, 2005

Page 1. susan Scott PARRISH University of Michigan REVIEW ESSAY The "Hemispheric Turn '... more

Women's Nature: Curiosity, Pastoral, and the New Science in British America

Early American Literature, Mar 22, 2002

Page 1. susan scott PARRiSH University of Michigan Women s Nature Curiosity, Pastoral, and the Ne... more

Rummaging/In and Out of Holds

American Literary History, 2010

<i>The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England</i> (review)

Early American Literature, 2012

Book Review:Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications William Merrill Decker

Modern Philology, 2002

Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World by Victoria Dickenson (review)

University of Toronto Quarterly, 1999

Talks by Susan (Scotti) S Parrish

Noah's Kin: Chicago Humanities Festival Presentation

A public talk drawn from Parrish's new book, The Flood Year 1927

Susan (Scotti) S Parrish

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Talks by Susan (Scotti) S Parrish

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