Taylor A Eggan

I am a comparative literature scholar with broad interests in African literatures and cultures (Anglophone, Francophone, Swahilophone); Scandinavian literatures and cultures (especially Norwegian); post-, anti-, and decolonial theory; environmental philosophy; phenomenology; and the theory and practice of literary translation. At PNCA I teach a range of courses in critical theory and creative research across the Hallie Ford School of Graduate Studies.

Though rooted in the close study of literary texts across several languages, my research projects are multidisciplinary in nature and seek to understand the myriad ways literature enriches, complicates, and otherwise intervenes in our understanding the relation between the self and the world. The role of reading as an affective and phenomenological practice stands at the heart of my thinking.

My first book is Unsettling Nature: Ecology, Phenomenology, and the Settler Colonial Imagination (University of Virginia Press, 2022). Throughout this work I draw on research in philosophy and the environmental humanities in an attempt to unsettle the logic of coloniality that underlies narratives of ecological homecoming as well as narratives of settler-colonial homemaking. The book includes chapters on Martin Heidegger, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence. C. M. van den Heever, Olive Schreiner, Doris Lessing, and J. M. Coetzee.

At present, I have several projects underway. The first is a book project tentatively titled Speculative Perception, which pursues various literary, philosophical, and somatic forays into what I call “exo-phenomenology.” As the prefix “exo-“ suggests, exo-phenomenology is a phenomenology of the outside; it pushes beyond the boundaries of ordinary perception to explore the social, political, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of engaging with alien phenomena and other othernesses.

I am also working on two works of literary translation. One project is a translation of the Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop’s 1981 work Le temps de Tamango (“The Time of Tamango”), a highly experimental, intertextual, and speculative take on the postcolonial African dictator novel. The other project is a translation from the Norwegian (Nynorsk) of Dordi Strøm’s hypnotic, prize-winning 2023 novel, Odel.

In addition to my scholarship, I am also a freelance writer and editor with over a decade of active practice in the field. I’ve worked most recently as the editor for the ongoing digital humanities project PEMM, which is short for the Princeton Ethiopian, Eritrean, & Egyptian Miracles of Mary Project.

Finally, I am a dancer and performance maker whose artistic practice integrates improvisational investigation, virtuosic movement, and wide-ranging research. Recent work includes Abominable (2017), an evening-length work of dance theater. Still in the early stages of development is a forthcoming work to be called Extinction Mass. As I imagine it, this project revives for the new millennium the medieval tradition of performing masses for the end of the world, though it does so with a decidedly queer perspective inspired in part by the cinematic imagination of Derek Jarman. The Extinction Mass is part ritual practice for processing collective grief about the many human and other-than-human worlds already in the process of ending. Yet it also aims to conjure a space for alternative world-making rooted in queer and femme sensibilities.

For more information please visit my website, The Exploded View, where I also publish essays on world literature in translation.