Nikita Willeford Kastrinos is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle where she researches and teaches 18th- and 19th-century British literature and book history. Her interests include the environmental humanities, media and material cultural studies, and the digital humanities.
Her dissertation, Of Form(es) and Form(ats): Ecologies of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Novel, works at the intersection of literary analysis, book history, and the environmental humanities to ask questions about the relationship between aesthetic form and the natural world. Through discussions of works by Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker, and Joseph Conrad, she investigates the way the period’s literary artifacts reveal their ecological embedding through two registers—literary form and material format (i.e., the book as a bundle of paper, glue, ink). Inquiring into the relationship between these two entities, she pays attention to the formal agencies of the period’s ecomedia, proposing a new methodology for examining the interventions of the natural world in the aesthetic structures organizing literary objects. Following the development of the British novel, her chapters offer a transhistorical perspective of novelistic development as it coincides with the shift from pre- to post-industrialized print and the rise of extraction capitalism, ultimately, laying the groundwork for a nascent field of the environmental humanities called the environmental history of the book.
Nikita Willeford Kastrinos serves as the site designer for the UW Humanities Data Lab and is currently a Research Associate in Program Development and Outreach for the UW Textual Studies Program. She has written on digital methods for collaborative reading, as well as collaborated on data-driven literary-historical research, including Scottish Women Writers on the Web.