Anna Jones Abramson specializes in interdisciplinary approaches to modern and contemporary literature, with particular interests in environment and climate sciences, affect theory, war, and violence. She is currently at work revising a book project titled The Age of Atmosphere: Air, Affect, and Technology in Modernist Literature. The study explores twentieth-century atmosphere in multiple senses of the word: literal air and weather; public moods; aesthetic and literary ambience. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, technological innovations such as poison gas, the airplane, the radio, and modern weather forecasting made air lethal, palpable, and legible in unprecedented ways. At the same time, modernist writers experimented with new formal strategies for generating literary atmospheres. Abramson’s project traces the historically and technologically inflected convergence of these meteorological, affective, and literary atmospheres, and considers a range of implications for contemporary crises in climate change and climate control.
Abramson received her PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016 and comes to MIT following a fellowship year at Harvard University’s Mahindra Humanities Center. She has published scholarship on Virginia Woolf in the Journal of Modern Literature, on J.M. Coetzee in Otherness: Essays and Studies, and on Joseph Conrad in Studies in the Novel (forthcoming).
