Gina Caison, Kenneth M. England Associate Professor of Southern Literature at Georgia State University, will discuss her new book, Erosion: American Environments and the Anxiety of Disappearance (Duke UP 2024), from noon to 1 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 26, in Kimpel 321.

Erosion traces how American authors and photographers have engaged with soil erosion as a material reality that shapes narratives of identity, belonging and environment. Caison analyzes works such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Octavia Butler's Parable series, John Audubon's Louisiana writings and Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother to reveal how concerns over erosion reflect deeper anxieties about disappearance rooted in the legacies of settler colonialism.

In underscoring how erosion narratives overlap with erasure narratives, Caison argues that soil loss not only occupies a complex metaphorical place in the narrative of American identity, it is also central to preserving the settler colonial state through Indigenous dispossession. At the same time, Caison examines how Indigenous texts and art such as Lynn Riggs's play Green Grow the Lilacs, Karenne Wood's poetry and Monique Verdin's photography challenge colonial narratives of the continent by outlining the material stakes of soil loss for their own communities.

Ultimately, Erosion investigates how visual and literary narratives can both constrain and expand possibilities for imagining human and environmental futures.

Caison teaches courses in U.S. Southern literature, Native American literature and documentary practices. Her first book, Red States: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Southern Studies (UGA Press 2018), won the 2019 C. Hugh Holman Award for the best book in Southern literary studies. Along with Lisa Hinrichsen and Stephanie Rountree, she is co-editor of Small-Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU Press 2017) and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (LSU Press 2021).

In addition to these projects, Caison's work has appeared in academic journals including The Global South, Mississippi Quarterly, Native South and PMLA. She has been a research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest and she served as president of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature from 2020-2022.