I’m Melanie Walsh, a PhD candidate in 20th- and 21st-century American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I’m working on a dissertation that follows postwar American literature as it’s been recirculated by networks of readers in the 21st century, tentatively titled Postwar Redux. My first chapter, “Tweets of a Native Son,” follows the quotation and circulation of James Baldwin in relationship to the #BlackLivesMatter movement during 2014 and 2015. You can check out some of my work-in-progress for this chapter here.

Other things I’m excited about include the 300-level literature course about social media and the contemporary American novel which I taught last fall and which I’m teaching again next summer. I also have a blast co-convening the Digital Approaches Reading Group on campus.

In my spare time, I play shooting guard for the English department intramural basketball team (“Eyre Jordan”), and sometimes I make Twitter bots about literary figures like Kanye West/Walt Whitman or memed-out William Carlos Williams.