Rachael DeWitt specializes in the environmental humanities with a focus on the literature and culture of nineteenth-century America. Her research considers how nineteenth-century Americans conceived of their everyday lives as happening in concert with the natural world. By bringing domestic writing and nature writing together, DeWitt’s work restores a cohort of once-popular women writers to the American environmental literary canon.
DeWitt’s current book project, Fruitless Pleasures: Ecologies of Decline in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, explores how writers of the period wrote about their homes and their environments as lively spaces even when they were in a state of decline. In other words, they conceived of growth queerly, divorced from the expansion, acceleration, and futurity that attends it today. Combining queer-theoretical and eco-formalist methods, Fruitless Pleasures reframes this minimalist strand within early environmental thought as a product of the period’s anxieties over declining birth rates, financial volatility, environmental exhaustion, racial hierarchy, and improving print technologies. The book’s chapters move chronologically, tracking “fruitlessness” as it grows quietly across the nineteenth-century literary landscape, from the antebellum naturalism of Susan Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau to the postbellum regionalist fiction of writers like Sarah Orne Jewett, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Charles Chesnutt. Ultimately, Fruitless Pleasures argues that nineteenth-century literature articulates a nuanced understanding of growth as something that could be lively without tending toward the future, intimating concepts of conservation and sustainability that would captivate policy makers in the century to follow.
An article taken from Fruitless Pleasures has been published in PMLA. Other articles and reviews on nineteenth-century American literature and the environment have been published in ESQ, The Dial, Early American Literature, ALH Review, and Configurations. Her next project will expand her recent work on antebellum women’s mountaineering narratives into a literary history of the environmental origins of feminism in America.
Prior to joining the WashU English department, DeWitt was a postdoctoral fellow at WashU’s Center for Humanities. Before that she taught in Columbia University’s Undergraduate Writing Program. She completed her PhD at UC Davis in 2023, her MA in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah, and her BA at Colorado College.