*Book monograph forthcoming with Manchester University Press’s Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century Series. https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/series/interventions-rethinking-the-nineteenth-century/
Charles Darwin's natural scientific oeuvre can be interpreted as a meditation on decompositional processes. Focusing on worms, molluscs, corals, fish, and fungi, "Dead Darwin" analyses the evolutionary aesthetics of decomposition in contemporary fiction, film, art, and poetics. In this project, death and decay become a creative threshold for evolutionary progress, inciting a renewed critique of the principles of life, matter, and being in Darwin's evolutionary theory.
Image: Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott, decomp