J.D. Schnepf, PhD

Overview

J.D. Schnepf's current research focuses on literatures and cultures of US militarism. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in academic journals including Contemporary Literature, Feminist Media Studies, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Media + Environment, Modern Fiction Studies, Museum Anthropology, Review of International Amerian Studies, Surveillance & Society, and American Literary History: Online Review. In addition, she has essays in the digital humanities volume titled, Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor (Routledge), in the recent volume, Life Forms: Essays on the Artworks of Andreas Greiner, and the Display, Synthesis, and Simulation of Life (Snoeck), and in the forthcoming collection, Drone Aesthetics: War, Culture, Ecology (Open Humanities).

Schnepf is currently at work on a book project that traces the connection between militarized drones that maintain US imperialism overseas and twenty-first-century cultural representations of femininity, domesticity, and humanity. In 2022, she co-edited a special issue of Review of International American Studies (RIAS) on gender and surveillance with Dr Molly Geidel.

In 2019, she was awarded two competitive prizes from international and national academic associations: the Emory Elliott Prize by the International American Studies Association (IASA) at the IX IASA World Congress and the Amy J. Elias Founder's Award by the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP). Her research has been supported by institutions including Brown University, Harvard University, Princeton University,  The English Institute, the American Association of Geographers, the Huntington Library, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. 

Schnepf offers courses in the areas of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American studies, literature, gender and women’s studies, and surveillance studies. Recent courses include "Domestic Cultures of US Imperialism"; “Computers and US Culture”; “Domestic Disturbances”; “Reading Minds”; and “Imagining Media.”

Before joining the faculty, Schnepf was a Postdoctoral Lecturer in the Princeton Writing Program and the 2019-2020 Postdoctoral Associate for the Project on Gender in the Global Community (GGC) Seminar "Gender and Security" at Princeton University. She also mentored first-generation, low-income students as a SIFP Faculty Fellow. Before Princeton she served as a Lecturer in the History & Literature concentration at Harvard University where she also co-directed the Novel Theory Across the Disciplines seminar at the Mahindra Humanities Center. She earned her Ph.D. in English from Brown University.

Selected Publications

• "Introduction" with Molly Geidel. Gender and Surveillance, Special Issue. Review of International American Studies. 15.1 (2022).
• "Disenchanting Technoliberalism." Contemporary Literature. 61.4 (2021).
• “Flood From Above: Disaster Mediation and Drone Humanitarianism.” Media + Environment. Ed. Lisa Parks and Janet Walker. 1.2 (2020).
• "Unreliable Vision: On the Art of Optimization and Loss.” Life Forms: Essays on the Artworks of Andreas Greiner, and the Display, Synthesis, and Simulation of Life. Ed. Carson Chan. Gent: Snoeck (2020).
• “In Sheep's Clothing: Mammalian Morphologies and Aerial Infrared Surveillance."Feminist Media Studies. Ed. Safiya Umoja Noble and Melanie Kennedy. 20.2 (2020).
• “Review of The Robotic Imaginary: The Human and the Price of Dehumanized Labor by Jennifer Rhee.” American Literary History: Online Review. Series XXI (2020). 
• "Racialized Surveillance and the US Census: Tabulating Labor." Humans at Work in the Digital Age: Forms of Digital Textual Labor. Ed. Andrew Pilsch and Shawna Ross. New York: Routledge (2019).
• "Unsettling Aerial Surveillance: Surveillance Studies After Standing Rock."Surveillance & Society, 17.5 (2019).
• “Exhibit Review: ‘Drone Warriors: The Art of Surveillance and Resistance at Standing Rock.’” Museum Anthropology, 42.2 (2019).
• “‘Hopes and Dreams Toward Survival’: Art and Security at the US-Mexico Border.” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21.3 (2019).
• “Aerial Domestic Photography in the Era of Drone Warfare.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, 63.2 (2017).
• “Imagining the Near Future: An Interview with Dexter Palmer,” Public Books, July (2016).

Selected Awards, Prizes, and Fellowships

• 2019 Amy J. Elias Founder's Award, Association for the Study of Arts of the Present
• 2019 Emory Elliott Essay Prize, International American Studies Association
• 2019 University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Award, Princeton University
• 2019 Fellowship for Distinguished Non-Geographer, American Association of Geographers
• 2018-19 University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Award, Princeton University
• 2017-18 University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences Award, Princeton University
• 2016-17 Provostial Fund Award, Division of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University
• 2016-17 Elson Family Arts Initiative Award, Division of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University
• 2015-16 Provostial Fund Award, Division of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University
• 2014-15 Provostial Fund Award, Division of Arts and Humanities, Harvard University
• 2013-14 Research Fellowship, Huntington Library
• 2013-14 Research Fellowship, Christopher Isherwood Foundation