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Michele Currie Navakas

Michele Currie Navakas is professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a 2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellow at The Huntington. She is the author of Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America (Princeton University Press, 2023) and Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).

Publications

Liquid Landscape: Geography and Settlement at the Edge of Early America

Michele Currie Navakas (2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellow at The Huntington)

In Liquid Landscape, Michele Currie Navakas analyzes the history of Florida's incorporation alongside the development of new ideas of personhood, possession, and political identity within American letters. From early American novels, travel accounts, and geography textbooks, to settlers' guides, maps, natural histories, and land surveys, early American culture turned repeatedly to Florida's shifting lands and waters, as well as to its itinerant enclaves of Native Americans, Spaniards, pirates, and runaway slaves.

Cream colored book cover with an illustration of a small boat in the ocean, near a large rock, title reads "Coral Lives"

Coral Lives: Literature, Labor, and the Making of America

Michele Currie Navakas (2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellow at The Huntington)

Michele Currie Navakas tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a cherished personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor.

Michele Currie Navakas (2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellow at The Huntington)

Verso

Portrait of a woman wearing a coral necklace, sitting next to red drapes with gold tassels.
A book full of seaweed

A Book Full of Seaweed

Posted on April 1, 2018