Biography
Emma Hitchcock is a PhD candidate in the department of English and Comparative Literature. Her research attends to the early medieval North Atlantic archive. Her reading methods, informed by critical Indigenous studies, aim to contribute to our understanding of colonial logics and reparative possibilities.
During Emma’s dissertation fellowship (2022-2023) she was a Visiting Scholar at the Arctic University of Norway’s Center for Sámi Studies. Her most recent research is concerned with correlating Sámi and English concepts of memory-craft, ecology, and canonicity. Her dissertation, “Unbinding the English Body Politic: Remembering Old English Genres with Indigenous Theories of Growth,” is motivated by the question of what it means for English to be a colonial language.
Emma is an instructor of record at Columbia University, where she has taught “Literature Humanities” and “University Writing: Data and Society” in the core curriculum, as well as “Literary Texts, Critical Methods” in the English department. She was a TA for ENGL4729 “The Canterbury Tales” and ENGL4901 “History of the English Language.” She is also a member of the Dis-Inventing Old English working group, a large-scale collaborative project of reimagining the way that early medieval English is conceptualized and taught in academic settings.
Before coming to Columbia, Emma earned a BA in Religious Studies from Yale University and then studied the neuroscience of pain and emotion with Tor Wager’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab for two years. Her work has appeared in Medieval Ecocriticisms, Old English Medievalism (Boydell & Brewer), The Oxford Handbook of Positive Emotion and Psychopathology, and The Nature of Emotion (Oxford). She has a forthcoming co-authored chapter in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Nature series.
