Biography

Molly Volanth Hall received a Mellon-Council for European Studies Fellowship for her dissertation, “Ecologies of Materiality and Aesthetics in British Modernist War-Time Literature, 1890-1939,” for which she has received additional research funding from the Graduate School, the URI Center for the Humanities, and the Northeast Modern Language Association. Advised by Dr. Jean Walton, her dissertation focuses on the constitutive entanglements of the British national subject in landscape representation within modernist responses to World War I – looking in particular at the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Rebecca West, Nancy Cunard, David Jones, and Radclyffe Hall, among others.

Her work on the imbrication of subjects and environments during periods of historical trauma is found in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, and “Something has gone crack”: New perspectives on J.R.R. Tolkien in the Great War (2019). Her examination of the modern roots of such environmental aesthetics also appears in Romantic Sustainability (2016). She recently co-edited a collection of scholarly essays, Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature (University Press of Florida, 2019) which explores how modernist texts re-theorize the body in ways that shed new light on our understanding of how the body matters through and to affect and ecocritical theory.

An advocate of the public humanities, she helped organize a conference on climate change and communication here at URI and a state-wide panel discussing veterans’ experience of homecoming through humanities texts. Before coming to URI, she completed her M.A. in literature from University of New Hampshire and an M.Ed. from Cambridge College (Mass.), specializing in sustainable and humane education.