Biography
Joselyn Takacs is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She holds an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her writing has appeared in Narrative, Tin House's Open Bar, Harvard Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Entropy, The Rumpus, DIAGRAM, Columbia: A Journal of Art and Literature, and elsewhere. She was featured as one of Narrative magazine’s Top Writers Under 30. She has received support from the Banff Centre for the Creative Arts, the Blue Mountain Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She teaches writing at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
Research
“Petroleum in Five Acts: Slow Violence along the Mississippi River and the Niger River” is an ecocritical enquiry that measures the efforts of artists from two heavily-industrialized river deltas to use the ecological crises wrought by fossil fuel as the inspiration for art that advocates for environmental justice. My research pairs visual and literary works featuring sites along Mississippi River and the Niger River to examine how artists render on-going ecological devastation as a result of the petrochemical industry. By tracing the portrayal of the petroleum industry, petroleum itself, and the communities it affects, in these photographic and literary texts, I consider how, through distinct mediatic and formal qualities, these works invest petroleum with uncanny power. In doing so, I evaluate the environmental rhetoric these artists use to advocate for de-industrialization, conservation, and environmental justice in affected communities. I argue that these artists paradoxically cast an uncanny, supernatural aura around the petroleum industry, or the “toxic sublime[1],” in order to demystify the tangible processes at work in these regions and internationally.
[1] Peeples, Jennifer. "Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes." Environmental Communication 5.4 (2011): 373-92.
