Graduate Student Directory

Research Interests

Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century British & Transatlantic Literature; History of the Novel; Ethical Theories of Literature; Representation; Personhood; Sound Studies; 

Biography, Education and Training

Spencer Armada is a PhD candidate in the department of Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz, where he is completing work on a dissertation on the 18th-century novel. His research interests include the history of the novel and theories of literature, personhood and subjectivity, ethics, and sound studies. His dissertation is chiefly concerned with the early English novel’s mediation of  he anxieties attendant to  shifting conceptions of knowledge production in the period, and is focused particularly on the trouble posed by sound to prevailing theories of representation and epistemology. 

Education:

M.A. Humanities, San Francisco State University, 2017

B.A. Humanities and Comparative Literature, San Francisco State Univeristy, 2015

Selected Presentations

“Sound, Representation, and Ethics in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” American Society for 

Eighteenth Century Studies 2023. Panel: Phenomenology of the Novel

“De-naturing Sense: Ethics and the Rhetoric of the Body in 10:04” 

Cultural Studies Association, Columbia College Chicago. Panel: “Embodied Non-Sovereign Freedom”