Overview
Julia Laurel Mueller holds a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation, “The Intelligence of Attention,” focused on the dynamic between observation and writing of attention to the natural world in natural history and lyric poetry in English (18th-20th centuries) and French (20th-21st centuries). Her current research interests include English and American poetry and poetics, natural history and nature writing, animal studies, ecocriticism and environmental humanities. Articles and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in ELH, ISLE, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters and The Hopkins Review.
Research Focus
My book in progress, A Poetics of Birds, asks: what relation is and has been possible in English between writing, reading, and perception of birds? I search lyric poems, natural history, nature writing and field guides, from the 17th century through the present, for forms of fidelity to the lives of birds—structured by elements of avian existence such as egg, nest, song, foraging, predation, flight and migration, social and flock life, through death, population decline and extinction. My project during the fellowship year focuses on the way writers move between abstract knowledge and concrete, imaginative perception of birds going “silent” (in their declining populations, in extinction; but also in the seasonal silences that have long attended the departures of migratory birds for their wintering or breeding grounds). Given the population declines documented and publicized in North American and Global “State of the Birds” reports, I ask what it could mean for human records to hold the silences of other species. To elaborate a poetics of avian silence, I look to texts and material objects that document, describe, represent or respond to the continuous and discontinuous silences and absences of birds; and to those that ask the question the other way around, seeking to document, describe, represent or evoke persistent signs of avian presence.