Department of English

 

Rachel Hartnett is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida. Her dissertation, Base Camp Literature: U.S. Invisible/Hyperpresence in Foreign Occupations, engages with growing interest in the study of US military bases abroad. She argues that US base camp literature presents a new figuration of US empire recognizable not just through the presence of structures of settler colonialism but, crucially, through unique representations of what she has termed the invisible/hyperpresent US military. The interdisciplinary approach of her research operates at the intersection of postcolonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, and multi-ethnic American studies. She has been published in the Journal of Popular Culture and Tropical Imaginaries and Climate Crisis, a special issue of eTropic.

She currently serves as the Co-President of UF’s Graduate Assistants United, the Program Coordinator of the PODEMOS Initiative, and the Co-Chair of the National Education Association Graduate Student Committee. She has been awarded the 2022 O. Ruth McQuown Scholarship, an Alpha Epsilon Lambda National Membership, the 2022 UF Champion for Change Award, and the 2021 Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She also co-authored the 2021-22 UF Library Enhancement Grant in the Humanities, “Collection Enhancement in Indigenous Studies,” with Dr. Robin Wright and Ginessa Mahar. She serves as an invited reviewer for eTropic and an Editorial Board Member for the UF Journal of Undergraduate Research. She has organized two conferences: Transformations: Canonical, Critical, and Creative at UF in 2017 and the English Graduate Student Society Fall Academic Conference at Florida Atlantic University in 2015.