Research

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Wolfe, Monica. “Mapping Imperialist Movement in Postmodern Horror Film Midsommar.” Journal of Popular Film & Television, vol. 49, no. 4, December 2021, pp. 210-222. https://doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2021.1881036 

Abstract:
Ari Aster’s 2019 postmodern horror film Midsommar reflects current cultural preoccupations with globalization and American empire building in the twenty-first century United States. Mapping the film’s ideological attributes (including femininity/masculinity, academic knowledge/folk knowledge, and capitalism/communism—the strict binaries of which set false expectations for all other binaries to hold) onto its physical locations makes clear two prominent ideological spaces: the perverse urban and the idealized pastoral, which appear not only in Midsommar but in many horror films to which this chart can be applied. The horror of the film is driven by the objectified Other’s resistance to the imperial power’s desire to dominate physical place and own ideological space, but is complicated by a suggestion that, in this unique case, the Other is also a nationalist, right-wing power, and the tension between home and foreign reflects that of a new Cold War. The boundaries between spaces and places are disrupted, and our very inquiry into the structure of space is called into question. 

Keywords: Colonial Tourism, Globalization, Horror Film, Imperialism, Space and Place

Wolfe, Monica. “Eve Writes Back: Feminist Adaptations of Milton’s Paradise Lost.” More Equal: New Essays on Milton and Hutchinson, Edited by David Ainsworth and Thomas Festa. Clemson University Press. Forthcoming, 2024.

Felluga, Dino Franco, et al. “EVENT 2024: Embodied and Virtual Events across Nations and Time.” Victorian Review. Forthcoming, 2024.

Submitted Publications Under Review

Wolfe, Monica. “Animated Interventions: Imagined Postcolonial Eco-Futures in Indigenous Film and New Media.” Currently under review at Camera Obscura.

Dissertation

Demarginalized Modernism: An Anthology of American Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

a critical anthology of literature & film
digital | interactive | open-access | multimedia


I am currently creating a digital, interactive, critical anthology titled Demarginalized Modernism: An Anthology of American Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century using the open-access academic publishing platform Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE). This project is my dissertation, and following my defense in Spring 2025, I will submit the edition for peer review followed by formal, born-digital publication at COVE Editions, after which it may accessed by scholars and adopted for use in undergraduate and graduate classrooms.


This project anthologizes both literature and film for a fuller presentation of culture at the turn of the twentieth century as the emerging technology of the motion picture influenced the storytelling tradition. The selection of primary texts includes approximately 30 works of literature and 30 works of film in a range of genres, all created or published in the period 1885-1930 in the United States. All selected works have been historically marginalized in cultural and literary studies: they have not typically been included in anthologies, are either currently inaccessible online or difficult to access, and/or are neglected in academic study. Demarginalized Modernism is in part a recovery and accessibility project while also engaging in a critical uncovering of intersectional aspects of modernist American culture heretofore hidden by the erasure of texts marginalized on the basis of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, and class. Bringing these forms of identity together in a reimagined anthology will facilitate the examination of how such identities intersected in the period.


In my project, I take advantage of the digital and interactive publication platform to eschew the bracketing-off method of presentation that print anthologies use. Rather than separating/segregating texts by single-identity-descriptor chapters or headings, Demarginalized Modernism creates a web of texts linked together by connecting themes, figures, and events: the focus on “intersectionality” could be said to apply to what you could call the intersectional structure of the dissertation. There is no prescribed order in which to navigate the texts and paratextual material. A reader may navigate the texts in several ways, and each reading of the anthology will likely lead to new combinations and orderings of texts. This intersectional rather than linear style of presentation is accomplished through the use of multiple interactive paratextual materials including a robust timeline; multimedia in-text annotations; galleries of video, image, and written material; and critical essays, all of which contain hyperlinks to relevant connections in the primary and paratextual materials.

Research Statement

Overview

My research investigates the intersections of marginalized identities in American literature, film, and culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, with a particular focus on agential identity—the self-determined construction of identity as a mode of resisting and countering interlocking systems of oppression. Through this lens, I study how marginalized individuals and groups have asserted agency in their cultural production in the face of systemic inequalities. Methodologically, my work bridges the digital and traditional: I use digital humanities tools to archive and preserve marginalized texts with an emphasis on open-access scholarship, while also grounding my analysis in critical theories including postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and gender and queer studies. This dual approach allows me not only to recover overlooked voices but also to critically analyze their contributions to broader cultural and social movements.

Past Research

My past research includes three peer-reviewed publications and several conference presentations, all of which laid the foundation for my dissertation project.

My first peer-reviewed publication, “Mapping Imperialist Movement in Postmodern Horror Film Midsommar” (2021), which engages theories of settler colonialism and evaluates gender as an unstable ideological space of power negotiation, is in the 84th percentile of Altmetric scores due to its wide discussion not only in peer-reviewed sources (five citations thus far) but also in the public spheres of social media and Wikipedia.

My forthcoming peer-reviewed book chapter “Eve Writes Back: Feminist Adaptations of Milton’s Paradise Lost,” is an invited contribution by editor David Ainsworth, who attended my 2019 conference talk on critical adaptation as a new approach to feminist Milton criticism and asked me to expand my talk into a chapter to be published by Clemson University Press. The chapter engages not only with more traditional academic discourse on the epic poem but also with contemporary literary and popular culture critical interpretations of the work, from adaptations by black American authors Rita Dove and Toni Morrison and Ojibwe author Louise Erdrich to popular television commercial adaptations that demonstrate not only the ongoing impact of classic texts but also cultural needs for revision and reinterpretation with diverse perspectives in mind.

Forthcoming co-authored article “EVENT 2024: Embodied and Virtual Events across Nations and Time” is an invited contribution to the journal Victorian Review and theorizes sustainable solutions to the future of international academic conferencing in the face of climate crisis and is based on the EVENT 2024 project I am currently involved in as a research assistant alongside Drs. Dino Felluga, Emily Allen, Joshua King, and Chris Adamson. The article describes our use of digital humanities tools to construct environment-first hybrid international knowledge-sharing networks.

 

Current Research

My current work on the sustainable conferencing project EVENT 2024 involves the development of digital humanities platform Collaborative Organization for Virtual Education (COVE) for use in conferencing. Previously, COVE was primary aimed at higher education classroom use, publishing both primary source texts and peer-reviewed material.

 

I am also involved in the development of COVE for classroom use as the Project Manager of COVE’s three-year NEH Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant in which I train, oversee, and edit text encoding to make accessible texts primarily by and about people of color. In October of this year, I will co-present with NEH Grant PI Adrian Wisnicki on the EVENT 2024 roundtable “Discovering COVE: A Roundtable of Case Studies” in a talk titled “AI Prompt Engineering for the Development of COVE.”

 

Aside from these collaborative projects, I also have independent scholarship underway, including an essay under review at Camera Obscura, a prominent journal in feminist theory and media studies, titled “Animated Interventions: Imagined Postcolonial Eco-Futures in Indigenous Film and New Media.” This essay won two awards at the 2024 Purdue Literary Awards: the Environmental and Nature Writing Award and Best Overall Graduate Entry. In the essay, I argue that emerging trends of indigenous animation and new media as modes of storytelling act as a decolonial response to Eurocentric myths of nationhood, borders, and land ownership by linking environmental themes to colonial power and suggesting the necessity of intervention by women in decolonization and environmental healing.

 

My dissertation project, Demarginalized Modernism: An Anthology of American Culture at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, is scheduled for defense in Summer 2025. This digital humanities project anthologizes underrepresented and difficult-to-access texts by marginalized writers and filmmakers, theorizes the act of digital recovery, and provides critical frameworks for understanding the texts’ significance within the broader landscape of American modernism and intersectional systems of oppression. In addition to various digital timelines, galleries, maps, and primary texts, my original paratextual materials include four critical essays: 1) “The Birth of a Race Film: Agential Identity in Early Black American Cinema,” 2) “Responses to Cultural Appropriation: Costume, Disguise, Assimilation, Resistance,” 3) “‘If I have sinned...I'm afraid I don't care much’: Unapologetic Queer Love and Modernism,” and 4) “First Wave Feminism, Work, and The Body in Modernist Film and Literature.”

 

Future Research

Following the defense of my dissertation, I will submit Demarginalized Modernism for peer review and born-digital, open-access publication by COVE Editions, where it can be adopted for classroom and scholarly use. I will also continue my role as Administrative Director of COVE.

 

In the first two years of professorship, I plan to complete a monograph project for which I am currently in the planning, research, and drafting stage. The monograph investigates methods of activist storytelling in contemporary indigenous literature, film, and new media. It builds upon my essay “Animated Interventions” that is currently under review and includes additional material on Indigiqueer poetry including trans AfroIndigenous poet Alan Pelaez Lopez’s Intergalactic Travels: Poems from a Fugitive Alien and indigenous Two-Spirit poet jaye simpson’s it was never going to be okay.

 

In 2029, a text I am particularly interested in, Coyote Stories by Okanogan writer and migrant farmworker Mourning Dove, will enter the public domain, at which time I plan to publish an open-access critical edition of the work, which straddles oral storytelling traditions and ethnographic work and is complicated by the interference of a white anthropologist editor. Methodologically, I will approach the critical work through postcolonial theory frameworks and archival research including Mourning Dove’s editor’s correspondence and photographs at Washington State University’s special collections and possible archival materials from the author herself. This edition will complement the open-access version of her earlier novel, Cogewea, that I have encoded and made available as part of my dissertation project.

 

Conclusion

My research combines traditional and digital humanities methodologies to recover and analyze marginalized voices in American literature, film, and culture. By bridging digital tools with critical theory, my work offers new frameworks for understanding how marginalized individuals and groups assert agency within oppressive systems. Moving forward, I plan to deepen my focus on activist storytelling, digital recovery, and cultural analysis, continuing to explore the intersections of identity, power, and resistance in both historical and contemporary contexts. My work strives to enrich the field by broadening the understanding of how diverse voices shape and challenge dominant narratives.

 

My work contributes to the broader academic shift toward open-access and digital humanities, which seeks to democratize knowledge and challenge the traditional structures of academic knowledge sharing. By focusing on marginalized voices, my research aligns with current efforts to diversify the canon and promote educational equity.