Ami Yoon

Ami Yoon (Ph.D. Columbia University, 2023) specializes in the literatures and cultures of early and nineteenth-century America, with research and teaching interests in poetry and poetics, history of science, and environmental humanities. Her first book project, The Reparations of Poetry: Poetics, Natural History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century America, traces how nineteenth-century American poets persistently seized the methods and idioms of natural history to articulate poetic theories and formal designs, in the process of presenting their poetry as symbolic reparations for reckoning with some of the constitutive violences of America in an era of settler colonial expansionism, slavery, and war. By asking how the reading of natural history influenced the writing of poetry long beyond natural history’s term of relevance for scientific professionals, her book unfolds the formal life of natural history in nineteenth-century poetics by examining how poets adapt the conventions, methodological practices, and subjects of New World natural histories for their own poetry amidst the violent social and historical contexts of American life. The Reparations of Poetry thereby complicates the literary historical commonplace that affirms narrative prose—especially prose nature writing—to be the aesthetic heritage of popular natural history, in the wake of Henry David Thoreau; it also provides an alternative cultural analytic for engaging with the field of nineteenth-century American poetry, besides the reigning critical optics of Romanticism, sentimentalism, gender, and material culture.

Her writing has appeared in venues such as Early American Literature, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities (Bucknell University Press, 2022). At Baruch, she teaches courses on pre-1900 American literature and Great Works seminars.