_Profile

Emily Eyestone is a PhD candidate in the Department of French & Italian, working under the supervision of Nick Nesbitt. Her research examines the impact of geo-climatic disaster on the literature, cultural identity, and postcolonial political trajectories of islands in the French Caribbean. Her dissertation, “The Dialect(ics) of Disaster: Geopoetics of Catastrophe in the French Caribbean,” explores how Afro-Caribbean writers like Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and Suzanne Césaire formulate a geopoetics of hazard, in which environmental catastrophes are figured not just as neutral accidents of nature, but as the result of social and ecological vulnerabilities stemming from plantation slavery. Other research interests include disaster studies, ecocriticism, poetics, music, 19th c. French poetry, and postcolonial theory.

_Research

Emily's work has been generously supported by a fellowship from the Princeton Institute for Regional and International Studies (PIIRS). At Princeton, she also completed a University Administrative Fellowship (UAF) with the Pace Center for Civic Engagement, where she worked to strengthen graduate student participation in service and outreach. She has served as a Community Associate for the Graduate School and taught for three years with Princeton's Prison Teaching Initiative (PTI).