Crafting Disciplines interrogates the material dimensions of nineteenth-century scientific objects to reveal a network of craft processes—fancywork, stenography, and photography—that materially and technically supported the emergence of modern American scientific disciplines. Engaging with the histories of nineteenth-century American science, historical recovery projects of women in nineteenth-century American science, and science and technology studies (STS) scholarship on science as practice, this project demonstrates how craft shaped scientific domains through collegiate instruction, public popularization, and internal technical processes. I argue that women’s technical acuity with image and specimen creation, transcription, and notation of experimental procedures were integral to this key period in the development of modern American science. By tracking the material and sociocultural contexts of scientific craft objects made by three elite white women over the course of the century, I demonstrate how craftwork legitimated the burgeoning professional establishment by connecting it to white Christian ideologies associated with domestic production and, through its associations with the mechanical arts, ensured that descriptive and theoretical scientific methodologies remained connected to the social infrastructure of technical expertise required for technological progress.

Each chapter of this project is a case study examining a particular archival collection of crafted scientific objects made by white women embedded in the emerging professional scientific establishment of the nineteenth-century US. I emphasize the materiality of the archival craft objects to ground a discussion of how gendered craft practices shaped professional scientific disciplines and institutional formations. I begin in the college geology classroom, exploring how large visual aids made by Orra White Hitchcock for her husband’s lectures negotiated the unstable theoretical terrain of new geological concepts like deep time for audiences of Christian students. I then turn to the public lecture hall, where Elizabeth Agassiz sat day after day transcribing and later circulating her husband’s lectures on theories of polygenism for massive audiences across the New England and the South. I end in the astronomical observatory, delving into the world of solar photography at the Vassar College Observatory run by famed female astronomer Maria Mitchell as an experimental program in redefining women’s professional scientific work. A short coda explores the possibilities of a new scholarly craft practice—artists’ bookmaking—in researching the interdisciplinary histories of science and art. Situating artists’ bookmaking alongside the already established practices of historical reconstruction and studio art praxis, I discuss how my own engagement in making artists’ books alongside my research into the gendered histories of American scientific craft is exemplary of how we might approach archive-based craft research in the future.

The complexity and ubiquity of ecosocial crises demand that our methods of engaging with the world must become radical: far-reaching, fundamental-altering, and rooted firmly in the ground. This essay introduces and explores embodied ecocriticism as one possible answer to such an urgent transdisciplinary call. While traditional literary ecocriticism analyzes relationships between literature and environment, embodied ecocriticism reckons with the role of the critic as they participate in transcorporeal and relational intra-action. In the context of this essay, this is made visible through bodywork and earthwork, somatics and small-scale farming. Tracing feedback loops from idea to perception to action to impact and back again, the form and content of this essay reflect the recursive circuit that connects material to semiotic, nature to culture, and individual to environment. Understanding the physical and extra-physical bodies of ecocritics as contact zones between materialdiscursive theory and practice, this project employs autoethnography alongside traditional criticism to underscore the personal response-ability of scholars in sustainable world-making. Transforming self-centered and anthropocentric ways of being into collaborative becoming-with, we are presented with the opportunity to co-author multispecies ethnographies that prioritize symbiotic co-creation and emergence, and there is no better place to begin than in our own backyards and in our own bodies. The ongoing transaction and entanglement of humans with more-than-human counterparts identifies the body as synecdoche for the larger systems in which it is co-created and creating. Improvisational theory and social somatics reveal the personal and collective power of reuniting theory with practice in such critical physical action. Turning to the life and labor of a small farm as a particularly suitable location for fleshing out embodied ecocritical ‘fieldwork,’ this project understands alternative agricultures as improvisational forms of relational embodiment, drawing together the critical, environmental, and sensual concerns of applied ecocritique. I read my personal experience on the farm alongside David Mas Masumoto’s Four Seasons in Five Senses: Things Worth Savoring to explore how personal engagement with small-scale agroecologies models the confluence of embodied environmental theory and practice. Not ignoring the grim realities of a world shaped by capitalism but choosing instead to focus on the restorative power of co-creation and collective emergence, the embodied ecocriticisms explored throughout this project develop ever-more attentive and regenerative ways of being in, with, and of the world.

This dissertation explores the politics of spirit and processes of conversion during the antebellum period (1831-1860) and seeks to understand how such a politics came to shape ideas of race, gender, sexuality, family, citizenship, and nation in the U.S. By building upon Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this study introduces and develops a corollary term, pneumapolitics, that foregrounds the influence of Puritanism and Protestantism, more broadly, along with their shared emphasis on processes of spiritual conversion in order to tell a story about the emergence of American secularity that accounts for its religious specificity. While the genre of the “conversion narrative” serves as an important textual resource for understanding the structural elements of Protestant spiritual conversions in the U.S., exclusively focusing attention there ultimately belies the ways that processes of conversion exceeded that narrow context to influence nearly every aspect of antebellum culture. Within a Protestant frame, conversion, on one hand, acts as a spiritual technology for cultivating the subjective interior of an individual to align their beliefs with particular moral, theological, and legal systems and, on the other hand, serves as an ideological conduit through which these beliefs evolve in response to historical, political, and social pressures and pass from one generation to the next. While a primary aim of this dissertation is to uncover how hegemonic power structures operated to maintain patriarchal hierarchies of authority in social and political life from the colonial period to the antebellum era, its other central objective is to illuminate how pneumapolitics itself functioned as a discursive crucible in and through which the very idea of the “spiritual” was forged. Each of the literary artifacts in this project engages with and challenges the hegemonic structures that attempted to define and dictate the contours of spiritual life during the antebellum period and serves as an analytical cipher through which the operational patterns of those prevailing structures come more clearly into view. By highlighting an archive of spiritual resistance, this dissertation hopes to underscore how the dialectic relationship between competing concepts of “spirit” and conversion continue to profoundly influence social and political life in the U.S. by serving as discursive channels for both regimes of oppression and visions of liberation.

“Extra-Domestic Ecologies” assembles an unexpected, trans-inclusive archive of women writers from the long nineteenth century whose texts articulate ecological dynamics and queer kinships that were once a pronounced—and now largely forgotten—element of American discourse on family and home. Described as the nineteenth-century’s ‘cult of domesticity,’ this discourse of the home comprised one of early America’s most pervasive and enthusiastic cultural traditions. My reconstruction of the queer and environmental strands within this tradition shows that while domesticity was and remains a major vehicle for racialization, heteronormativity, and the acceleration of capitalism, it was also an important lever for queering the gendered labor of housekeeping, refuting heteronormative representations of biological reproduction, and multiplying the mutual dependencies that constitute both human and nonhuman environments. The canonical and forgotten texts I study—from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden to Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The White Rose Road”—articulate non-expansionist forms of growth and unproductive modes of transformation and renewal. I approach these texts through the critical lenses of gender performance, sexual orientation, and ecology to develop a method of reading that privileges inaction rather than progress. Finally, “Extra-Domestic Ecologies” resituates these key domestic writers within the canon of American environmental thought as vital resources for imagining what it might look like to disavow the individualism, growth, and activity at the root of today’s environmental crises.