Heather Houser

Heather Houser is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She received a Ph.D. in English from Stanford University, and a B.A. from Reed College. She is completing a manuscript titled Eco-Sickness: Fictions of Environment, Disease, and Emotion, which argues for the centrality of sickness and affect to environmental culture of the past three decades. She is also pursuing a project that offers an account of contemporary practices of novelistic description in the context of new technologies of visualization. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Literature (2011), Contemporary Literature (2010), and The American Book Review (2010), and in the collection, The Legacy of David Foster Wallace: Critical and Creative Assessments (U Iowa Press, 2011). She has received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the US Department of Education's Jacob K. Javits Program, and Stanford University.

Interests: 20th- and 21st-century Anglophone fiction (US focus); environmental literature and criticism; science, technology, and culture; the medical humanities; affect studies; description in narrative and new media.

(Source: Faculty webpage - University of Texas)