Literary Arts + Studies

Molly Volanth Hall’s teaching concentrates on ecocriticism and British modernism. Hailing originally from the Boston area, she earned her MA from the University of New Hampshire, has an MEd and is currently a doctoral candidate at University of Rhode Island. Her teaching and research interests include the environmental humanities, trauma studies, war narratives, landscape representation and the relationship between nation, identity and literature in the 20th century, especially within the modernist period and its aesthetic afterlives. Her current project investigates the impact of modernist environmental aesthetics in World War I Britain and their effect on ecological epistemologies as they shifted during the 1920s and ’30s. She has taught both writing and literature classes that frame disciplinary inquiries from an environmental humanities perspective—especially interrogations of the perception of home in both its ecological and social senses. Her work on home-place also extends to pedagogic public scholarly inquiries into the topic of “homecoming” and war, most notably in the form of a RICH-funded public humanities event that she co-organized. Her research appears in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (ISLE), and she has co-edited a forthcoming collection of scholarly essays titled Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (University Press of Florida, 2019).