We are pleased to announce that Jess Hurley, who will be teaching a course on space and place for the Cultural Studies Department in Spring 2023, has won the 2022 American Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment Ecocritical Book prize.
Infrastructures of Apocalypse: American Literature and the Nuclear Complex by Jessica Hurley. University of Minnesota Press, 2020.
Judges commented: Jessica Hurley’s bracing study Infrastructures of Apocalypse examines nuclear representations that, in the author’s words, “defamiliarize the present, estranging us from the everyday world that we inhabit,” which is also a good description of what the book accomplishes. It delivers a bold challenge to doomsday rhetoric. It also deflates the fantasy of a final detonation. According to Hurley, the end is now; we are living it. Hurley exposes a world “saturated with nuclear logics” by shifting attention from the bomb to the present reality of the nuclear apocalypse as it is lived and articulated by various environmental and liberatory justice movements emerging from marginalized communities. Infrastructures of Apocalypse realigns the field of environmental humanities around nuclear narratives and delivers searing accounts of nuclear cultures past and present. It is a one-of-a-kind book that will help folks writing about and teaching a variety of environmental humanities topics.
August 22, 2022