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Susan Scott Parrish

Susan Scott Parrish is a Professor in the Department of English and the Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of race, the environment, and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth up through the mid-twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her new book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017)examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the 20th century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize. She has also written on such Anglo-Atlantic plantation figures as William Byrd II, Robert Beverley, John Gabriel Stedman, and Richard Ligon. She has served on the editorial boards ofAmerican LiteratureEarly American Literature, and the Winterthur Portfolio, has been a council member at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and has served on the Executive Committee of the MLA’s “American Literature to 1800” Division.

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