Past Graduate Student

last updated: August 29th, 2012

A third-year graduate student in Berkeley's doctoral program in English (designated emphases in STS and Critical Theory), my scholarship addresses how scientific practices andcultures have influenced literary criticism since its emergence as an academic discipline. I focus on modernist poetry and on the rhetoric of objectivity in a variety of turn-of-the-century discourses—in particular, aesthetics, cognitive...

I am broadly interested in histories of mapping and measurement, particularly in the context of Atlantic empires and their appropriation of Native American land. My dissertation compares cartographic practices during three imperial transitions: the French-British regime change in Quebec in the 1760s, the Spanish-French-American transition in Louisiana in the early 1800s, and the U.S. conquest of Mexican...

Niklas' research focuses on private, multi-stakeholder initiatives geared towards garment factory worker wages and environmental impacts. He approaches this topic as an engaged academic, working on both experimental interventions in Chinese and Southeast Asian clothing factories as well as critical work examining the increasing prevalence of technologically-...