The following interview was exchanged over email April to July 2025 between SEL Managing Editor Kelly McKisson and SEL Editorial Board Member Nathan K. Hensley. Books referenced are collected in a bibliographic list of suggested readings at the end of the page.

Kelly McKisson: Nathan, thanks for taking the time to think and write with me. You were recently in Houston, Texas, for a visit to Rice University, and you stopped by the offices of SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900. I wonder what it was like for you, an editorial board member, to come into the physical space of this near-sixty-five-year-old scholarly publication? I’ve been working in the SEL office for about seven years, and I still find it very important that we have this space that houses our work, as journal offices for Executive Editor and Managing Editor, and as workspaces for the Hobby Editorial Assistants.

The SEL offices contain computer workspaces, of course, but also print materials and physical books. Indeed, as you saw, we have a few shelves that still hold review copies of books, published between 2019 and 2023 or so, that were never sent to a reviewer, in large part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. You pulled out some of those books, including Mary L. Mullen’s Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism (2019). Why Mullen’s book?

Nathan K. Hensley. It was an immense honor for me to visit. I’d been invited to respond to Ragini Srinivasan’s superb new work in progress about interdisciplinarity, In(ter)disciplined: Scholarly Formation in Theory and Practice, and found myself with a chance to come by SEL. And I was so glad I did. It is a gorgeous space, tucked away on the fourth floor of the library such that, when you enter it, you don’t quite expect it to unfold the way it does. There’s a hallway full of books, your office, Amy’s office, and then a kind of workshop area where the undergraduate assistant and graduate students work. There were books everywhere; the space is bigger than you think it’s going to be, and it embodied the feeling of a place where thinking was happening at a high level, and in a collective way—I loved that. I was especially blown away by the workstations, which had copyediting crib-sheets and guides to printer’s marks taped to the shelves. (You let me take one as a souvenir!) And there was all this archived print material, huge metal filing cabinets, shelves of books, papers. It struck me as a space optimized for producing knowledge, but in time-honored ways—physically, I mean, and together. The past issues of SEL, spanning across yards of bookshelf in bound volumes, looked to me like an entire history of twentieth-century literary criticism, unfolding there in chronological order.

It is no surprise in this context that the first book I reached for was Mullen’s truly excellent study of institutions. The book was on the shelf of texts available for review, and I guess I had institutionality on the mind. Mullen’s argument is ingenious for its insistence on the dialectical quality of institutionality. Since the 1980s, several generational cycles of Michel Foucault-inspired work have taught many of us to think of “institutional” as a kind of slur: in Foucault the institutions that come up for analysis are spaces such as the mental asylum and the prison—carceral sites where the modern state’s monopoly on legitimate violence touches the bodies of those who fall most vulnerably under its control. There is no chapter in Foucault, that I know of, discussing a literary journal, or an institution of humanistic knowledge. I think of those institutions as spaces aiming to conserve ideas and protect approaches that are otherwise under threat.

As Mullen’s book acknowledges, Foucault doesn’t preclude the idea that institutions are productive too—in fact the key point about the material sites where discourse is operationalized (i.e., institutions), is that they’re both productive and constraining. Foucault insists on this double quality. But in the hands of literary critics of the ’80s and ’90s, it was usually the constraining or negative aspects of institutions that came up for discussion, and indeed that’s how many of us (me included) were trained. I see great value in this critical approach, but there was always a flavor of libertarianism or even anarcho-vitalism to this one-sided deployment of Foucault’s project, as critics such as Anna Kornbluh have noted. It was not always clear, for instance, what one was supposed to do in the absence of institutions, or whether a world without them was in all seriousness a better alternative. There is a famous moment in Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976, trans. 1978), published in French the year I was born, that sharpens this problem very acutely—control-F “curdled milk” and you’ll find it.

Anyway, Mullen’s book starts with a wonderful reading of the Circumlocution Office, in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), that emphasizes the recirculatory and performed quality of institutional knowledge. Institutions are enacted in behaviors and verbalized in discourse, but also materialized in things like offices, agencies, or—Foucault’s and Louis Althusser’s favorite example, and Dickens’s in Hard Times (1854)—schools. Mullen explains that institutions work because they formalize certain intellectual or social postures and generate, from those shared practices, path dependencies and common sets of presumptions: ideological infrastructures designed to persist into the future.

Simultaneously ideological and physical, such formations are designed to be restrictive, of course, since their job is to be durable. It’s this stultifying quality that is what comes up for Dickens’s satire in the office for Circumlocution or Gradgrind’s classroom. In Mullen’s gloss, the institution “delimits political possibilities” by “actively extend[ing] existing social arrangements into the future” (p. 1). Because infrastructurally realized and socially conditioned path dependencies perpetuate a prior set of practices, the normative content of those practices isn’t really specified.

That’s the double edge of the institution—its dialectical quality. If the “existing social arrangements” being extended are bad, then the institution is too. But the reverse is also possible—and it’s entirely conceivable that the social arrangements inaugurated in the absence of a given institution could be far worse than the social arrangements it had sought to preserve. I doubt many of us will need convincing of this today.

To be more direct: it strikes me that the 1980s and 1990s may have been a more apposite moment to meditate on the coercive and restrictive aspects of institutions. Our own period, by contrast, is one in which institutions like the NIH and the Kennedy Center, for instance, but also the postwar American university and humanistic knowledge as such, are all being actively dismantled, to be replaced by—who knows precisely, but signs point to an authoritarian police state organized to repress nonwhite people, transgender people, and women, and yet more efficiently siphon money to the billionaire class. So, our moment may well be a more apt time to reflect on the enabling aspects of institutions, since the positive facets of durability linger in the mind a bit more sharply than they may have before.

Finally, I guess I was struck by the almost pleasantly archaic or preservative quality of the institution at SEL. It seemed to want to extend a past life of knowledge and study into the future. I think that work of preservation and extension is profoundly important.

McKisson: Another book you pulled, Isabel Hofmeyr’s Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022), is sitting right next to Jodie Matthews’s The British Industrial Canal: Reading the Waterways from the Eighteenth Century to the Anthropocene (2023). I could keep listing the books with important overlaps in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, environmental concerns, histories of capitalism and industrial development, and empire—a lot of similar, excellent work continued to come out during and after quarantine. In some ways, this period might have provided some scholars time to stay home and read, but in most other ways, these books did not get the recognition they deserved as they missed out on readers—reviewers, publicists, editors, etc.—who were beset by all the nightmarish and exhausting realities of the pandemic. SEL certainly struggled to match some of these titles with available reviewers. What is there to say about books that emerged during the pandemic gap and, maybe specifically, what sticks out to you about Hofmeyr’s or other pandemic-era releases that have not been featured in SEL?

Hensley: It’s wild to think of the strange and uneven interfaces that connect the production of knowledge to a huge biosocial calamity like the pandemic. I do agree there is something regrettable about the vacuum of reception that met books released during the pandemic, although it’s also true that in the current world of publishing and academic life—attenuated by adjunctification, carved up by austerity, riven by overwork and engineered labor crises—academic books in general are rarely greeted by fanfare. These material conditions shape our encounters with scholarly ideas in ways that I don’t know have been fully figured out or theorized, though I would like them to be. For instance: if you are on a 4-4 load of adjunct piecework, do you have time to read carefully, let alone review, the latest monographs in your field? What about if you are in a position where the primary metric of success is the teaching evaluation—will you be asking your students to purchase and then read long, hard books primarily written for specialists? (These conditions underpin how the austerity university undercuts scholarly knowledge from both the production and the consumption sides.) Or, if you are somehow lucky enough to be on the tenure line somewhere, your department primarily runs on adjunct labor, so you are now on fifteen thousand committees, because the same or an increased number of “service roles” exist but the number of people to do them has been deliberately shrunk over a prolonged, decades-long campaign of attrition. In this case, when do you sit down to take notes on stacks of incredible new books? It is hard.

So I found it energizing to see these brilliant studies just waiting to be interacted with. I picked up the Hofmyer book because she’s obviously such an important thinker, and I’d seen her give an amazing talk from Dockside Reading at Georgetown once. The talk linked intensive archival sensitivity (close readings of commercial documents, letters, bills of lading) to an ambitious argument about these very particular sites of contact in the global economy: imperial custom houses. That bifocal or split attention, where you can see a granular level of historical detail and then pan out to broader systemic phenomena, is something I really admire about her work. For reasons of overwhelm and work-induced attention deficit, I’d never read the book version, so I felt drawn to it at that moment particularly.

Matthews’s book was not one I’d seen before, but glancing through made me see it was well-researched, so I could tell it would be informative and that I’d learn from it. I’d gotten a flavor of the importance of canals to the emergent fossil-capitalist system by doing a little bit of research into the porcelain and china industries once, but it was one of those things—there are many—where you mark for yourself a domain of future study and then sort of lose track of it. The British Industrial Canal reminded me of that whole domain of infrastructural transformation I’d noted once but set aside—a kind of remaindered idea. And so, it looked to me like a hugely promising book that somebody could write a cool review of for SEL.

I’m realizing that all the books I picked up are about what this response is turning out to focus on: the relationship between material configurations in the world and how cultural practices take shape in light of them. Another project I’m working on now is The Barbara Johnson Collective, which started off as a Zoom reading group and will soon be a physical book (coedited with Devin Garofalo, forthcoming from Northwestern Univ. Press). The project brings together a group of friends and colleagues who connected online in the late pandemic, Omicron-months of early spring 2022 with the idea of reading Johnson’s work in light of contemporary disasters such as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022). For that project, we all reflected a lot on the material conditions of our weird experiment. In thinking back, it has struck us that the hiatus-time of the pandemic had been, like Mullen’s institutions, dialectical: it was such a brutal period for so many—literally lethal, at mass scale—even while for some it also enabled new and often weird formations of connection and creation. My wife Anne tells the story of getting into hallucinatory chats with other people at the grocery store, early in the pandemic, connecting with strangers at the drop of a hat. Everyone was eager, I suppose, for sociality beyond the family dynamic or the “pod”—an entirely new style of social life, so far as I’m aware. At a national level we had emergency measures like direct payments and eviction hiatuses that were as close to a genuine socialist form as we’ve had since the New Deal, all of which has, of course, evaporated. So, because we were all living in the weird no-time of pandemic and perhaps also bored, a group of collaborators met in a series of Zoom meetings to discuss the work of Johnson in the aftermath of Dobbs. I don’t think it would have happened if there wasn’t a pandemic. In that sense, even catastrophic material constraints enable new solidarities, and awful world-historical failures enable new projects, in the full philosophical sense of activities undertaken in the condition of freedom. A collection of academic essays is obviously a very tiny example of that, but you get what I mean.

McKisson: One of our Editorial Assistants had Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s book out on their workspace: Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (2020). You mentioned that Miller’s book is a touchstone for your own work—your new book is Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature after Climate Collapse (2025). Miller ends the introduction to Extraction Ecologies by responding to the debates over presentism—for example, whether a book about nineteenth-century industrial extraction is necessarily aimed at considerations of the present, twenty-first-century climate crises; Miller writes that the book practices a method of attending to multiple timescales, a “heterotemporal historicism” (p. 23). How do you navigate the question of historical method when working on Victorian literature and climate catastrophe, or when teaching students about Victorian literature and climate crisis? What else makes Miller’s book an important interlocutor for your own?

Hensley: I can’t say enough about how much Extraction Ecologies meant to my own work, so I’m glad you brought this up. I could write a whole book about it, and in some ways, I sort of did. I remember seeing Miller’s book at SEL, along with books by Andreas Malm and others, all of which suggested to me that someone in the office had been thinking along lines that I was. So, I was glad that turned out to be true!

Presentism is not really a word I like to use much, and I think Miller’s excellent formulation is a way of circumventing what I think she sees, too, as a kind of false choice between caring about the past and caring about the present. Fredric Jameson uses the idea of an archaeology of the present, Foucault uses the figure of genealogy, and many others offer different ways of blasting out (that’s Walter Benjamin’s trope) from the strangely durable separation of the present from the past. There are many models that can help us supersede the naive idea that you can either study the past or present and never the twain shall meet, methodologically. They are in fact always meeting, and they meet even in work that disavows that encounter—in fact sometimes most powerfully there, since it is often those methodologically incurious works that most vividly carry on the ideological structures they inherited without realizing it. In The Principle of Hope (1959), Ernst Bloch describes these naive historical approaches as attempts to seal that past under glass, or turn history into a kind of wax museum, when instead the past should be seen as a repository of possibility, infinitely alive.

Miller’s book takes up a relationship to its own methods of thinking about time that is different than Bloch’s wax museum people, and I admire its restless curiosity about its own historical position. Extraction Ecologies shows us we are at the far end of long processes, breathing air saturated with carbon released in the 1850s, our lives powered by energy archived in the age of dinosaurs—people should read Michael Tondre’s amazing short book Oil (2024) for an account of the Sinclair oil dinosaur as one emblem of this fossil energy uncanny. I remember learning that the groundwater in Fresno, California, where I grew up, has been in the earth for tens of thousands of years before it’s piped out and evaporated in the spray of suburban sprinkler systems. This feeling of being in the midst of what Miller calls the “dizzying temporalities of extraction-based life” is a key facet of all modern experience, maybe, but radicalized, for sure, in the age of climate breakdown (p. 11). I think that Barbara Leckie’s recent book, the very beautiful Climate Change, Interrupted (2022)—another pandemic-era release—is likewise an attempt to think seriously about climatic shift and temporality, and what those linked ideas might mean for how to approach studying the nineteenth century. In some lovely passages Leckie also evokes the hiatus-time of COVID; it’s quite great. So, I feel very lucky to have learned from those books, and many others, in trying to assemble my own account of an imperial nineteenth century we haven’t yet outlived.

McKisson: Can you tell readers a little more about your new book, Action Without Hope? How did you come to organize your work around these chapters and around the question of action in the face of the vast scale of climate crisis?

Hensley: Action Without Hope is in many ways a record of my own attempts to address some of the questions I’ve been going on about above. It started with intensive encounters with objects that seemed to far exceed the scripts of interpretation I could bring to bear on them: Wuthering Heights (1847), Middlemarch (1871–72), Emily Brontë’s strange and illegible verse fragments, Christina Rossetti’s poems about the end of the world. It’s an effort on my part to annotate what I think these writers and artists were getting up to: a necessarily inadequate attempt at thinking alongside those earlier thinkers. Maybe, too, it is an effort to break them out of the glass cases of a historicism that would see their experiments as things we can domesticate and understand. I wanted to reanimate those works to show them as still alive and able to teach us. But it also comes out of the experience of writing my first book, Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty (2017). That emphasis on sovereignty, I realized, was in some sense a way of taking the history of liberalism and bourgeois political thought at its word, accepting one of its key mythological structures. And so, for this second project, I reversed the emphasis on willed decision and implemented projects. Instead of being about violence, volition, and sovereign power, it’s about the forms of capacity and idioms of making change that happen at much lower, less militaristic or heroic registers. Hannah Arendt has an essay from the Cold War period, “What is Freedom” (1961), where she asks us to try to imagine non-sovereignty, or counter-sovereignty, and maybe my book is kind of about that. She doesn’t really think we can, by the way, and I agree. We are stuck inside an inheritance we can’t ever fully transcend but must try to rework from the inside.

After finishing Forms of Empire, I also had the realization that the canonical accounts of British imperialism I’d learned from had little to say about where this interpersonal domination had transpired—even though that’s something Frantz Fanon, for instance, was very clear about, since his wretched are “of the earth” (1961). I found that the domination of human populations under imperialism and the domination of nature under the gathering carbon economy were, of course, profoundly interrelated, and Action Without Hope is in some ways an effort to chart the consequences of that realization. It’s about “action” because as I suggested, I began to see that the rhetorics of sovereignty, ownership, and capacity in the sense of what we call “agency” were all of a piece. These concepts are all tied together in John Locke, of course, where you have property in your own person.¹ I came to see that the conceptual apparatus of imperialist domination was linked from the outset not just to the capture of nature or enclosure of waste, as Locke puts it, but also to the definitions of action that we might use to think past or against that tradition. It is a tangled and perhaps irresolvable situation that (I found) got many of the smartest people in the nineteenth century to develop elaborately gorgeous new aesthetic forms. How are we supposed to think outside of this tangled inheritance, or to twist it into new shapes? Well, that is the story of the artworks I read in the book.

McKisson: The use of climate crisis as a frame for knowledge production has me thinking about what we have been referring to as “the pandemic era.” The SEL team is struck by how one might describe the scale and scope of our pandemic-era temporality by the work published—or overlooked—during its duration. You mentioned Leckie’s Climate Change, Interrupted as an example of a beautiful book from the pandemic era, and we noted other books from that seem to be waiting for interaction and readership. So, we wondered, if one was to seek out these books, what time ranges would one look to specifically? 2020–2022? 2019–2025? Is there something we might say about methodological approaches one could take in pursuit of interlocutors who may have fallen into the margins?

Hensley: I love this idea of searching out ideas that have been overlooked. Neferti Tadiar draws on Theodor Adorno to describe remaindered knowledge, or thought that is abandoned: left “by the wayside.”² That effort to recover the subordinated at the level of concepts is very important to me, too, and is something I worry over explicitly in my book. The idea of pandemic-era temporality is fascinating, since it opens complicated ideas of periodization that I try to bring up in the book: what is a period, anyway? And how do we know when one is over? We can speak of “the pandemic era,” for instance, and know what we mean, but of course there were infinite micro-periods within that period—the Delta wave, the Omicron era, the two weeks when Georgetown pivoted to virtual before coming back in person for the rest of the spring 2022 term, during which time our kids were back at regular school sans masks. And in a strong sense none of this is over, since two people in my house had COVID-19 again recently.

All these complex time signatures and micro-periods sync unevenly to the equally weird time patterns of academic writing. What counts as pandemic-era scholarship? It’s not at all obvious, since a project might have been published during the pandemic but conceived and written long before. Alternatively, the pandemic might have conditioned the writing of a book or essay in certain ways that may or may not show up in the text—or will show up obliquely.

Would scholarship written during the weird eddies of pandemic time have longer sentences, more semicolons? A thicker or thinner field of reference? This question of stylistic signatures and intellectual practice would be interesting to try to figure out. And then there is the question of all the work that was not produced at all because of the pandemic, but that might have been—a great unread of the era of global shutdown. Work that couldn’t get done because kids were home, because parents or loved ones or yourself were sick, because we were trying to learn how to teach multiple sections of a Zoom course on a laptop that wouldn’t work, or whatever. An old friend and brilliant colleague had long COVID and was laid up for more than a year with it: what thoughts might have been thought, but weren’t, due to that? What thoughts were thought differently? Likely all of them.

Tadiar quotes Adorno, who describes knowledge that is neither the product of victory nor of defeat: “If [Walter] Benjamin said that history had hitherto been written from the standpoint of the victor, and needed to be written from that of the vanquished, we might add that knowledge must indeed present the fatally rectilinear succession of victory and defeat, but should also address itself to those things which were not embraced by this dynamic, which fell by the wayside—what might be called the waste products and blind spots that have escaped the dialectic.”³ I think it would be good for us to ask ourselves about the great unread of the pandemic era, and to go out of our ways to intentionally locate knowledge that fell by the wayside during that period, or those periods. Let’s call this an attention to the “waste products and blind spots” of the scholarly field, post 2020.

NOTES

1 In the chapter “Of Property,” John Locke writes that “every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his” (Two Treatises of Government [London: 1689], p. 215, https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112039642811).

2 Theodor Adorna, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Verso, 2005), p. 151, qtd. in Neferti Tadia, “By the Waysides; or Bypass and Splendor,” Modernism/Modernity 2, 4 (January 2018), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/waysides.

3 Adorno, p. 151, qtd. in Tadiar.

 Image Credit: Landry Wood 

Bibliography of Suggested Readings

Althusser, Louis. On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshgarian. Verso, 2014.

Arendt, Hannah. “What Is Freedom,” in Between Past and Future. Penguin, 1961, pp. 143–72.

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken, 1968, pp. 253–64.

Bloch, Ernest. The Principle of Hope. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. MIT Press, 1986.

Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. Illus. H. K. Browne. 3 vols. Bradbury and Evans, 1857.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Random House, 1978.

Hensley, Nathan K. Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty. Oxford Univ. Press, 2016.

Hensley, Nathan K. Action Without Hope: Victorian Literature After Climate Collapse. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2025.

Hofmeyr, Isabel. Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House. Duke Univ. Press, 2022.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005.

Johnson, Barbara. The Barbara Johnson Reader: The Surprise of Otherness. Ed. Melissa Feuerstein, Bill Johnson González, Lili Porten, and Keja L. Valens. John Hope Franklin Center Book. Duke Univ. Press, 2014.

Leckie, Barbara. Climate Change, Interrupted: Representation and the Remaking of Time. Stanford Univ. Press, 2022.

Kornbluh, Anna. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Univ. of Chicago Press, 2019.

Matthews, Jodie. The British Industrial Canal: Reading the Waterways from the Eighteenth Century to the Anthropocene. Intersections in Literature and Science. Univ. of Wales Press, 2023.

Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn. Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion. Princeton Univ. Press, 2021.

Mullen, Mary L. Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture. Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2019.

Tondre, Michael. Oil. Object Lessons. Bloomsbury Academic, 2024.