Undergraduate Fellow
Ysabella Colwell has worked as a research assistant for Professor Carol Percy, served on the committee for the 2024 Trans, Disability, and Sapphic Knowledges undergraduate conference, and worked as Managing Editor for the IDIOM English Undergraduate Academic Journal. She is especially interested in Romantic Gothic literature, queer and intersectional world-making practices, and the inter-relationship of land, monstrosity, and the body. She intends to pursue an academic career in interdisciplinary literary studies.
Fellowship Project: It’s all Coming Up Fungus: Decay, Regeneration, and the Embodied Underground in Fungal Horror
Fungi may be Earth’s primary decomposers and represent death and decay, but its underground mycorrhizal network also functions to distribute life-supporting nutrients to other organisms. Fungi’s dichotomous nature and classification as neither plant nor animal but biologically Other inform the contemporary resurgence of fungal horror texts that foreground the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle aesthetics of the monstrous Gothic body through a twenty-first century EcoGothic, non-anthropocentric examination of human-environment relations. Through the fungal transmutation of feminized, queer, and racialized bodies, I ask how a comprehensive analysis of the fungal horror genre explores destructive colonial legacies while illuminating the anti-colonial, world-making potential of an eco-apocalypse.