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
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.
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.
Frontiers
Michele Currie Navakas—professor of English at Miami University and a 2017–18 National Endowment of the Humanities fellow—tells the story of coral as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a highly sought-after ornament used for display and adornment, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphor.
Algology preserves a passionate engagement with the underwater worldThe documentary Chasing Coral (2017) brings coral close. Using underwater time-lapse photography, the film chronicles the catastrophic effects of global warming on coral reefs.