Abigail Fields

Abigail Fields is the Hall Family Foundation Assistant Professor of French at the University of Kansas. Their research is primarily interested in the representation of agriculture in French-language literature and popular media from the 19th century to the hyper-contemporary. Their current book project, The Literary Field: Agriculture, Narrative and the Ecocritical Imaginary in Nineteenth-Century France, presents a case study of agricultural fields in literary production of the period, to trace the development of a cultural construction of often taken-for-granted notions of land, landscape and agriculture. This work also offers an agro-ecocritical re-theorization of setting, through the analytic prism of agriculture as a narrative force. Their second book, Farming Identities: Agriculture and/as Social Critique identifies in contemporary French-language literature direct responses nineteenth-century constructions of the farmer. Through modern perspectives on gender and nationalism, this project examines how writers today are normalizing or queering agriculture, and (re)locating broader social identity in the figure of the farmer or paysan. Their third book, La Banane française ? A (De)colonial Crop traces the history of the banana as symbol and site of colonial oppression and decolonial resistance in metropolitan French and French Caribbean art and media in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. They have a growing body of work on queer and trans ecologies and ecopoetics. They are currently working on a translation of Samira Negrouche’s L’Opéra cosmique, to be accompanied by a longform essay on her the poet’s “trans ecopoetics.” 

Fields is a creative writer and poet, whose work has been published in literary magazines, group exhibitions and independent publications. They are co-editor of The Goose: A Journal of Arts, Environment, and Culture in Canada.