Price Mid-Doctoral Fellow
2022
2023

Jonathan Dick

Ph.D. Candidate, English

Jonathan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in the literature and criticism of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries. His dissertation is about the narration of environmental and social transition, and the figures of speech that aesthetic objects, like the realist novel, treat as incompatible with it. He received his BA and MA in English from the University of Toronto and has been the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright program, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Related interests include the history of aesthetics and critical theory, the theory of the novel, the environmental humanities, and the history of literary criticism.

For the 2022-23 academic year, Jonathan will be a Mellon Mid-Doctoral Fellow with Penn’s Price Lab, working on a textual analysis of the contemporary novel’s relationship to the pathetic fallacy. This research is indebted to the proto-computational work of Josephine Miles, who pronounced the death of the pathetic fallacy in 1942, and it asks whether this trope unwittingly finds new life in fiction written during a time of climate change.

 

Jonathan in a blue button-up shirt