
Dr. Nathan Snaza
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Profile
Nathan Snaza’s work explores how ideas about what it means to be human have been put to work in educational institutions, especially those that engage language, literacy, and literature. Drawing on work in the fields of affect theory, new materialisms, queer and feminist theory, and Black and decolonial studies, his work both critiques modern histories of education linked to humanism, and tries to imagine and experiment with alternatives.
His first monograph, Animate Literacies (Duke University Press, 2019), explores how nonhuman actors animate literacy events, and how literacy practices animate subjects and political relations. It does so in part through literary close readings (of texts by Toni Morrison and Frederick Douglass, among others) but it re-situates familiar ideas about reading in wider, weirder networks drawing on ethology, neuroscience, chemistry, affect theory, ecology, and philosophies attentive to the agency of things. Politically, the book traces how the study of literature and literacy have been linked to a colonial capture of the human, and it draws on Sylvia Wynter’s work to imagine alternative futures for politics and literary study.
His second book, Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man (Duke University Press, 2024) is an analysis of feminist, queer, decolonial, and abolitionist esoteric practices. Broadly, it weaves new materialist and affect theories with work on coloniality and anti-Blackness to think about how knowledge practices are inextricably linked with modes of selfhood and more-than-human social life. Analyzing writings and performances by Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English, Arthur Evans, Starhawk, Maryse Condé, Divide and Dissolve, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Octavia Butler, and Christina Sharpe, the project marks a turn for him toward the field of religious studies, as he considers how everyday practices, including spiritual practices, sustain worlds.
He is beginning his most ambitious project to date: Situating Theory: Materialism and The Academic Book Series. His aim is to produce a genealogy of Theory as a specific mode of interdisciplinary humanities discourse at once syntactical (and grammatical), ethical, citational, and material. The project focuses on eleven academic book series published (mostly) by university presses in the United States between 1981 and the present. Beyond reading over 800 books published across the series, Snaza is interviewing editors, authors, translators, publishers, and book designers and researching the material history of the presses. Combining intellectual and institutional history with attention to more-than-human agencies, he explores what enables Theory to emerge and persist as an intellectual, ethical, and material assemblage.
Snaza is simultaneously working on two shorter books: a theoretical diary about collecting vinyl records (tentatively titled Obsessed: Collecting Southern Lord Records), and a book on theories of language in relation to literary studies debates about “post-critique,” and the challenges posed to traditional conceptions of language (and human persons) by the fields of animal studies and asexuality studies. Additionally, he is currently co-editing, with Rebekah Sheldon and Tess Given, a collection called Esoteric Inhumanisms.
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Selected Publications
Books
Sylvia Wynter, the Human, and Curriculum Studies, edited with Aparna Mishra Tarc. Routledge (forthcoming).
Tendings: Feminist Esoterisms and the Abolition of Man. Duke University Press (2024).
Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism. Duke University Press, Thought in the Act series, edited by Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2019).
Journal Articles“Dehumanist Education and the Colonial University,” with Julietta Singh; editorial introduction to the special issue, “Educational Undergrowth.” Social Text 39.1 (2021).
“Asexuality and Erotic Biopolitics.” Feminist Formations (2020).
“Biopolitics Without Bodies: Feminism and the Feeling of Life.” Feminist Studies 46.1 (2020).
“Posthuman(ist) Education and the Banality of Violence.” Parallax 85. (2017).
“Departments of Language.” Symploké 23.1-2 (2015)
"The Failure of Humanizing Education in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory 26.3 (2015).
"The Place of Animals In Politics: The Difficulty of Derrida’s 'Political' Legacy." Cultural Critique 90. (2015).
"'The Reign of Man is Over': The Vampire, The Animal, and the Human in Maupassant's 'Le Horla.'" Symploké 22.1-2. (2014).
“The Human Animal Nach Nietzsche: Re-Reading Zarathustra’s Cross-Species Community.” Angelaki 18.4 (2013)
“Bewildering Education.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 10.1 (2013)
Book Chapters“Multiversal Ceremony: Tending Differential Being.” In The Witch: A Reader in Feminist Political Theory, ed. Katie Howard and Shannon Mariotti (Palgrave, forthcoming).
“‘What is a Witch?’: Tituba’s Subjunctive Challenge.” In The Witch Studies Reader, ed. Soma Chaudhuri and Jane Ward (Duke University Press, 2025).
“Sexualities: Biocentrism and Constructing of the Human.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Animals, ed. Derek Ryan (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
“Why This? Affective Pedagogy in the Wake,” in The Affect Theory Reader 2: Worlding, Tensions, Futures, Ed. Greg Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell (Duke University Press, ANIMA Series, 2023).
“Love and Bewilderment: On Education as Affective Encounter.” In Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, and Pedagogy, eds. Bessie Dernikos, Nancy Lesko, Stephanie D. McCall, and Alyssa Niccolini (Routledge, 2019).
“The Earth is Not ‘Ours’ to Save: Bewildering Education and (In)human Agency.” In Interrogating the Anthropocene: Ecology, Pedagogy, and The Future in Question, ed. jan jagodzinski (Palgrave, 2018).