Dr. Nathan Snaza

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.