Dr. Nathan Snaza
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Profile
Nathan Snaza is the founding Director of the UR Humanities Center. His teaching focuses on interdisciplinary humanities reading and research and is deeply informed by his scholarship, which explores how ideas about what it means to be human have been put to work in educational institutions, especially those that engage language, literacy, and literature. Drawing on work in the fields of affect theory, new materialisms, queer and feminist theory, and Black and decolonial studies, his work both critiques modern histories of education linked to humanism, and tries to imagine and experiment with alternatives.
His first monograph, Animate Literacies (Duke University Press, 2019), explores how nonhuman actors animate literacy events, and how literacy practices animate subjects and political relations. It does so in part through literary close readings (of texts by Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass, among others) but it re-situates familiar ideas about reading in wider, weirder networks drawing on ethology, neuroscience, chemistry, affect theory, ecology, and philosophies attentive to the agency of things. Politically, the book traces how the study of literature and literacy have been linked to a colonial capture of the human, and it draws on Sylvia Wynter’s work to imagine alternative futures for politics and literary study.
His second book, Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (Duke University Press, 2024) is an analysis of feminist, queer, decolonial, and abolitionist esoteric practices. Broadly, it weaves new materialist and affect theories with work on coloniality and anti-Blackness to think about how knowledge practices are inextricably linked with modes of selfhood and more-than-human social life. Analyzing writings and performances by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Arthur Evans, Starhawk, Maryse Condé, Divide and Dissolve, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia Butler, and Christina Sharpe, the project marks a turn for him toward the field of religious studies, as he considers how everyday practices, including spiritual practices, sustain worlds.
Coinciding with the founding of the UR Humanities Center, he is beginning his most ambitious project to date: Situating Theory: Materialism and The Academic Book Series. His aim is to produce a genealogy of Theory as a specific mode of interdisciplinary humanities discourse at once syntactical (and grammatical), ethical, citational, and material. The project focuses on eleven academic book series published (mostly) by university presses in the United States between 1981 and the present. Beyond reading over 700 books published across the series, Snaza is interviewing editors, authors, translators, publishers, and book designers and researching the material history of the presses. Combining intellectual and institutional history with attention to more-than-human agencies, he explores what enables Theory to emerge and persist as an intellectual, ethical, and material assemblage.
Snaza is simultaneously working on two shorter books: a theoretical diary about collecting vinyl records (tentatively titled Obsessed: Collecting Southern Lord Records), and a book on theories of language in relation to literary studies debates about “post-critique,” and the challenges posed to traditional conceptions of language (and human persons) by the fields of animal studies and asexuality studies. Additionally, he is currently co-editing, with Rebekah Sheldon and Tess Given, a collection called Esoteric Inhumanisms.
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Publications
Books
Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man. Duke University Press (2024).
Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Duke University Press, Thought in the Act series, edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2019).
Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies, Ed. with Debbie Sonu, Sarah Truman, and Zofia Zaliwska. Peter Lang Publishing, Counterpoints Series (2016).
Posthumanism and Educational Research, Ed. with John Weaver. Routledge International Perspectives in the Philosophy of Education (2014).
Journal Articles“Dehumanist Education and the Colonial University,” with Julietta Singh; editorial introduction to the special issue, “Educational Undergrowth.” Social Text 39.1 (2021).
“On Vagueness and Care: Affect and Literacy.” Reading Research Quarterly (2021).
“Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics.” Feminist Formations (2020).
“Ethologies of Education.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 20.3 (2020).
“Biopolitics Without Bodies: Feminism and the Feeling of Life.” Feminist Studies 46.1 (2020).
“Curriculum Against the State: Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Futures of Curriculum Studies.” Curriculum Inquiry 49.1 (2019).
“‘It’s Called a Hustle, Sweetheart’: #BlackLivesMatter, the Police State, and the Politics of Colonizing Anger in Zootopia,” with Jennifer Sandlin. Journal of Popular Culture 51.5 (2018).
“Aleatory Entanglements: (Post)humanism, Hospitality, and Attunement – A Response to Hugo Letiche.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 14.3 (2017).
“Animal Unconscious: Three Questions.” Studies in Gender and Sexuality 19.1 (2018).
“Posthuman(ist) Education and the Banality of Violence.” Parallax 85. (2017).
“Is John Dewey’s Thought ‘Humanist’?” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 32.2 (2017).
“Saint Bakhtin, Porous Theorizing, and Proceeding Nonetheless,” with Timothy Lensmire. Dialogic Pedagogy 5 (2017).
“Community at the Extremes: The Death Metal Underground as Being-in-Common,” with Jason Netherton. Metal Music Studies 2.3 (2016).
“School Sucks.” Perspectives Essay. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 13.1 (2016)
“Leaving the Self Behind.” Helvete Black Metal Theory Journal 3: Bleeding Black Noise (2016)
“Against Methodocentrism in Educational Research” with John Weaver. Educational Philosophy and Theory (2016).
“The Fragility of Ecological Pedagogy: Elementary Social Studies Standards and Possibilities of New Materialism,” with Debbie Sonu. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 12.3 (2015).
“Departments of Language.” Symploké 23.1-2 (2015)
"The Failure of Humanizing Education in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 26.3 (2015).
"The Place of Animals In Politics: The Difficulty of Derrida’s 'Political' Legacy." Cultural Critique 90. (2015).
“Class Time: Spivak’s ‘Teacherly Turn.’” Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices 9.1 (2015)
"'The Reign of Man is Over': The Vampire, The Animal, and the Human in Maupassant's 'Le Horla.'" Symploké 22.1-2. (2014).
"The Death of Curriculum Studies and Its Ghosts." Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 11.2 (2014).
“Toward a Posthumanist Education” with Peter Appelbaum, Siân Bayne, Dennis Carlson, Marla Morris, Nikki Rotas, Jennifer Sandlin, Jason Wallin, and John Weaver. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing (2014)
“The Human Animal Nach Nietzsche: Re-Reading Zarathustra’s Cross-Species Community.” Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. 18.4 (2013)
“Bewildering Education.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 10.1 (2013)
“Reductionism Redux: The Continuity Between Humans and Other Animals.” Perspectives Essay. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 10.1. (2013)
“What Teacher Education Can Learn from Blackface Minstrelsy,” with Timothy Lensmire. Educational Researcher, Vol 39, No. 5, (2010) 413-422.
“Abandon Voice? Writing Pedagogy, the Body, and Late Capitalism,” with Timothy Lensmire. InterActions, Vol 2, No. 2, article 3 (2006).
"(Im)Possible Witness: Viewing 'Holocaust on Your Plate,’" Journal for Critical Animal Studies Vol 2, No. 1(2004).
"Reflections Toward Visibility." Bad Subjects special war edition number 63 (2003).
Book Chapters“Sexualities: Biocentrism and Constructing of the Human.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals, Ed. Derek Ryan (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
“Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake,” in The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worlding, Tensions, Futures, Ed. Greg Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell (Duke University Press, ANIMA Series, 2023).
“Literacy Situations and the Dispersal of Politics.”In Ahuman Pedagogy: Multidisciplinary Perspectives for Education in the Anthropocene, Ed. jan jagodzinski and Jessie Beier (Palgrave, 2022).
“Critical Pedagogy Beyond the Human.” In Shirley Steinberg and Barry Down, Eds., The SAGE Handbook of Critical Pedagogies (SAGE, 2020).
“Love and Bewilderment: On Education as Affective Encounter.” In Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, and Alyssa Niccolini, Eds., Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogy (Routledge, 2019).
“The Earth is Not ‘Ours’ to Save: Bewildering Education and (In)human Agency.” In jan jagodzinski, Ed., Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Pedagogy, and The Future in Question (Palgrave, 2018).
“Dangerous Play: Race and Bakhtin in a Graduate Classroom,” with Timothy Lensmire, Rebecca Nathan, Susan Brooks, and Chiara Bacigalupa. In Frances Condon and Vershawn Young, Eds., Performing Anti-Racist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication (University Press of Colorado/WAC Clearinghouse, 2016), 211-226.
“#BlackLivesMatter: Racialization, the Human, and Critical Public Pedagogies of Race,” with Jennifer Sandlin. In Alexander Means, Derek Ford, and Graham Slater, Eds. Educational Commons in Theory and Practice: Global Pedagogy and Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
“Bodies, Borders, and the Politics of Attention,” with Debbie Sonu. In Nathan Snaza, Debbie Sonu, Sarah E. Truman, and Zofia Zaliwska, Eds. Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (Peter Lang, 2016).
“Toward a Genealogy of Educational Humanism.” In Nathan Snaza and John Weaver, Eds. Posthumanism and Educational Research (Routledge, 2014), 17-29.
“Posthuman(ist) Youth: Control, Play, and Possibilities,” with John Weaver. In Awad Ibrahim and Shirley Steinberg, Eds. Critical Youth Studies Reader (Peter Lang, 2014), 349-359.
“Thirteen Theses on the Question of State in Curriculum Studies.” In Erik Malewski, Ed. Curriculum Studies Handbook- The Next Moment (Routledge, 2009), 43-56.
ReviewsSymposium editor, “Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American 19th Century by Elizabeth Freeman.” Syndicate. My introduction and response essays by Kadji Amin, Christian Haines, Erica Fretwell, and Ashon Crawley can be found here.
“Listening for a World Without Me: A Book Review of Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Studies by Dylan Robinson.” Feral Feminisms (forthcoming).
Symposium editor, “Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements by Julietta Singh.” Syndicate. My introduction and response essays by Olivia Michiko Gagnon, Dorinne Kondo, Jennifer Nash, Parama Roy, and Chad Shomura, are here.
“Implicitly.” Journal of Perpetrator Research 3.1 (2020), 20-28. A Response to Michael Rothberg’s The Implicated Subject (2019).
“Preemptive Logic and the Necessity of Animal Politics.” Symploke 24:1-2 (2016). A Review of two books by Brian Massumi: Ontopower (2015) and What Animals Teach Us About Politics (2014)