Hello reader. This week I began my readings for my orals. I hope to update you with my scattered thoughts as I progress through a dense and winding path of ideas and histories. Yes, I am already behind.

For the next few months, I will be reading all about materialism. I began my PhD program as a materialist in multiple senses. For one, I had written my undergraduate thesis on a materialist writer of early modern England, Margaret Cavendish, understanding her literary practice as literally linked to her natural philosophy (I made this link through drawing a similar connection between Shelley Jackson, author of the digital hypertext Patchwork Girl, and the “code” of her literary medium). Therein, I was interested in a materialist theory of gender/the body, writing, love, and history all enmeshed. Second, I entered the program not knowing I was riding the wave of “new materialism:” my thesis is littered with Deleuze, Butler, Plant, Preciado, Morton, and more writers whom I have since come to learn are generally categorized under this specific genealogy of critique. Graduate school has helped me to understand and contextualize the particular juncture of the theoretical work these writers do while expanding my critical palate significantly.

So, materialism. This list begins as far back as I could pull it (officially the 6th century B.C., but as you will see in my next post, I will fold in movement even farther back) and ends with the “new materialism” wave I rode into graduate school and therein formal scholarship. This list will be a journey of texts I know really well (Margaret Cavendish, for one, but also Plant’s Zeroes and Ones and Butler’s Bodies that Matter) amid many texts I’ve often pretended to know more about than I actually do (Spinoza for one, but even Marx, Aquinas, and many others).

I’ve never tried to have an academic blog before, so bear with me. I will try my best to use citations, but I am choosing for my own organization (and, perhaps moreso, my vision) to take most of my reading notes in a notebook, so I may not hold myself so strictly to page numbers. I hope to use this blog as a space to chew over tricky ideas as I come to them, or to try out some connections I’m drawing. Who knows if I am able to keep at it. That’s the fun of a blog, I guess. It’s there, but it doesn’t ask anything of me. It accepts what I give it without asking too many questions.

If you are reading this, thanks for coming along on the ride with me. These posts might end up boring or irrelevant to your interests. But if you have thoughts about matter, gender, history, the world, texts, and random pop cultural fragments…well, we might have some fun!