McWilliams

Notable Achievements

Assistant Professor of English Rebecca Evans published a reflection on teaching Octavia Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower as part of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment’s Zoom In pedagogy series.

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Assistant Professor of English

Expertise

Twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture, African-American and comparative ethnic American literature, the environmental humanities, social and environmental justice, speculative fiction and SF film, American studies, genre theory

Rebecca Evans researches and teaches American literary studies from a multi-disciplinary perspective, focusing on how American literature by BIPOC writers is shaped by and helps to shape social movements.

Dr. Evans received her PhD from Duke University in 2016 and her BA from Columbia University in 2010. Before joining the faculty at Southwestern University, she was an assistant professor of English at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina (2016-2020), a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow (2015-2016), a Mitchell J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in Southern California (2015), and a lecturer of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2014-2015).

  • Biography

    Rebecca Evans researches and teaches American literary studies from a multi-disciplinary perspective, focusing on how American literature by BIPOC writers is shaped by and helps to shape social movements.

    Dr. Evans received her PhD from Duke University in 2016 and her BA from Columbia University in 2010. Before joining the faculty at Southwestern University, she was an assistant professor of English at Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina (2016-2020), a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow (2015-2016), a Mitchell J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library in Southern California (2015), and a lecturer of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2014-2015).

  • Research

    Dr. Evans’s scholarship addresses how literary works and literary studies can contribute to difficult conversations about social and environmental justice, considering how form and genre allow stories to mediate between individual experience and systemic explanations of inequity.

    She is currently completing her first book, Genre Friction: Structural Violence and Contemporary American Fiction, which argues that contemporary American novels have been formally shaped by the effort to incorporate structural and environmental violence into literary narrative and explores the development since the 1970s of a phenomenon she calls “genre friction,” in which realistic and fantastical genres emerge into and interrupt each other.

    Other ongoing scholarly work include three emerging projects in the environmental humanities: one exploring how Afrofuturist literature, film, and art produce novel affects related to environmental citizenship; one tracing patterns of mediation and formal complexity in global Anthropocene novels; and one at the intersections of environmental and health humanities and critical prison studies.

  • Publications

    Articles and Scholarly Book Chapters

    “Geo-Memory and Genre Friction: Infrastructural Violence and Plantation Afterlives in Contemporary African-American Novels.” The Infrastructure of Emergency, special issue of American Literature, vol. 93, no. 3, 2021, pp. 445-472.

    “Hyperempathy.” An Ecotopian Lexicon, edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Bellamy, University of Minnesota Press, 2019, pp. 110-121.

    “New Wave Science Fiction and the Dawn of the Environmental Movement.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 434-446.

    “The Best of Times, the Worst of Times, the End of Times?: The Uses and Abuses of Environmental Apocalypse.” Apocalypse, special issue of ASAP/Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, 2018, pp. 501-522.

    “Nomenclature, Narrative, and Novum: ‘The Anthropocene’ and/as Science Fiction.” Science Fiction and Climate Crisis, special issue of Science Fiction Studies, vol. 45, no. 3, 2018, pp. 484-499.

    “Fantastic Futures? Cli-Fi, Climate Justice, and Queer Futurity.” Environmental Futurity, special issue of Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2-3, 2017, pp. 94-110.

    “James Tiptree, Jr.: Rereading Ecofeminism and Essentialism in the 1970s.” The 1970s, special issue of Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 43, no. 3-4, 2015, pp. 223-239.

    Review Essays and Public Scholarship

    “Embodying New York: On N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 30 July 2020.

    Review of Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895–1941 by John Claborn, Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature by Sonya Posmentier, and Affective Ecologies: Empathy, Emotion, and Environmental Narrative by Alexa Weik von Mossner. American Literature, vol. 92, no. 2, 2020, pp. 390-393.

    “Even Further Afield.” Review of The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders. Los Angeles Review of Books, 27 July 2019.

    Review of Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times by Stacy Alaimo and The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe by Rebekah Sheldon. American Literature, vol. 90, no. 4, 2018, pp. 879-881.

    “Engaging a World Through Speculative Fiction.” The Center for Innovative and Transformative Instruction, Winston-Salem State University, 16 Feb. 2018.

    “What It Feels Like When Your World Ends.” Review of Black Wave by Michelle Tea. Public Books, 14 Feb. 2017.

    “SF as Social Theory.” Review of Of Bodies, Communities, and Voices: Agency in Writings by Octavia Butler by Florian Bast. Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 3, 2016, pp. 573-575.

    “Weather Permitting.” Review of Green Earth by Kim Stanley Robinson. Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 April 2016.

    “Sci-Fi Feminism.” EqualityArchive.com, Nov. 2015.