Shannon Finck

Ph.D. Georgia State University, 2014
M.F.A. Georgia College (GCSU), 2007

Transatlantic Modernism, Global Postmodern and Contemporary Literatures, Creative Nonfiction, and Narrative Poetry

Shannon Finck’s research and teaching interests include experimental literature, life writing, autotheory, feminist new materialism, speculative fiction, and the environmental humanities. Her courses emphasize environmental and social justice rhetorics, queer and gender studies, and multimodal composition and digital storytelling. Her critical and creative work appears in ASAP/J, Angelaki, Miranda, a/b: Autobiography Studies, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, The Journal of Modern Literature, Willawaw, Lammergeier, The Florida Review, FUGUE, and elsewhere. She currently serves as Poetry Editor for the independent literary quarterly, Birdcoat, and is Co-Founder of Atlanta’s Ghost Peach Press.

Dr. Finck’s current book project, Thin Skin: Autotheory and Resilience, connects experimental life-writing aesthetics to the discursive framing of certain crises of subjectivity, such as postwar trauma, identity affirmation, terminal illness, aging and memory loss, and encounters with structural or systemic violence. In Thin Skin, she argues that hybrid critical-creative prose methodologies, particularly new narrative and autotheory, attend to a pressing cultural need for theoretical writing that more transparently and vulnerably acknowledges the lived experiences of its producers. Her scholarship traces a long history of autotheoretical writing—often thought of as an emergent genre—in order to demonstrate life writing’s contributions to the resilience of marginalized voices and communities as well as the resilience of the form over time. Dr. Finck’s second book project, Green Subjects: Dissident Botanies in Contemporary Fiction, examines relationships between human-plant interactions and acts of passive resistance in contemporary climate writing.