Research team
Expertise
I study contemporary cultural responses to environmental challenges such as climate change. My current projects address how climate crisis is affecting reproductive decision-making among individuals and in literature, film, and art. I also have expertise in cultural representations of science and technology, reproductive justice, environmental justice, critical studies of data and information, and creative nonfiction writing. I bring humanities approaches to municipal climate planning and environmental advocacy as well.
Narrating Parental Regret in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Abstract
This doctoral project examines the literary representation of parental regret in contemporary anglophone fiction, focusing on how narrative techniques shape negative emotions that remain socially taboo yet are central to family life, reproductive decision-making, and wellbeing. While social and health sciences have begun to acknowledge parental regret as a consequential experience, literary and cultural studies have largely neglected regret as a distinct affective and narrative category. This project addresses this gap by theorizing parental regret as an affective, ethical, and political emotion uniquely suited to literary analysis. Focusing on anglophone fiction published since approximately 1990—a period marked by shifting family norms, declining fertility rates, and the expansion of the market for autobiographical and women's writing—the project analyzes how authors narrate regret through counterfactual temporalities, focalization, metaphor, and other narrative techniques. Regret is understood not merely as an individual but also as a socially structured emotion bound up with shame, guilt, gender inequity, and constrained agency. Drawing on narrative theory, affect theory, gender studies, and the health humanities, the project investigates how fiction renders the temporal and expressive complexity of regret and how these narrative forms illuminate tensions between autonomy and dependence inherent to family life. Through close readings of a selected corpus of novels, short fiction, and memoirs, the research develops a typology of narrative expressions of parental regret, attending to differences in intensity, outcome, and positionality across gender, race, class, sexuality, and life stage. It argues that contemporary fiction not only reflects social norms surrounding parenting but also experiments with alternative models of agency, responsibility, and care. By bringing literary analysis into dialogue with research on reproductive and family health, the project contributes to cultural theory, advances understanding of negative emotions, and offers ethical insights into the lived experience of parenting in conditions of social, economic, political, and ecological uncertainty.Researcher(s)
- Promoter: Houser Heather
Research team(s)
Project type(s)
- Research Project