Claire Seiler (NHC Fellow, 2025–26)

Claire Seiler is professor of English at Dickinson College. Her research and teaching focus on modern and contemporary English, Irish, and US literatures; the health humanities; poetry and poetics; and disability studies. Her current book project, The Narrative Lives of Polio, recovers the literary history of poliomyelitis from a dangerous vaccine oblivion. The book begins in the 1880s, when polio shifted from endemic presence to epidemic threat, and ends around 1965, a decade after the arrival of the first vaccines. An essay drawn from the book’s final chapter was recently published in PMLA.

Seiler is also the author of Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II (Columbia University Press, 2020) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Late Modernism (forthcoming). She has published essays in Contemporary Literature, Contemporary Women’s Writing, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Studies in the Novel, and Twentieth-Century Literature, as well as in other journals and several edited collections. Seiler’s work has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kalaris Term Chair in the History of Science at Dickinson, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. The latter funds “Beyond the New Normal: Disability, Literature, and Reimagining Social Justice,” a major institutional grant for which Seiler is principal investigator with Alyssa DeBlasio.

Selected Publications

• Seiler, Claire. “J.G. Farrell’s Lost Polio Novel.” PMLA 139, no. 5 (2024): 821–36.
• Seiler, Claire. “Nobody Cares but Everybody Should: Toward a Smarter History of the Novel.” Studies in the Novel 56, no. 4 (2024): 408–15.
• Seiler, Claire. “‘Totally ’80s’: The Eating Matters of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life.” Contemporary Women’s Writing 17, no. 3 (2023): 282–98.
• Seiler, Claire. “On or about 1945.” The Routledge Companion to Politics and Literature in English, edited by Matthew Stratton, 225–35. London: Routledge, 2023.
• Seiler, Claire. Midcentury Suspension: Literature and Feeling in the Wake of World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.