Davy Knittle
Davy Knittle (he/they) is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Davy works at the intersection of urban studies, queer and trans studies, and the environmental humanities. He is completing a book project entitled "Urbanist Desire and the Ecology of Queer and Trans Survival." His writing has appeared recently or is forthcoming in PMLA, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Feminist Formations. Davy lives in Philadelphia, where he spends a lot of time thinking about its infrastructure.
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Papers by Davy Knittle
Scalapino and Rich’s poems each describe sexualized experiences of public space in dialogue with the physical transformation of their cities. I use their embodied accounts of sexual responses to urban space to situate a reading of feminist anti-pornography activism within a material attention to cities and their redevelopment. This material attention registers sexuality as part of the sensory data and public life of the city. In short, I use the poems’ focus on the city and its sexualized and rapidly transforming set of spaces to argue that urban sexual history is planning history, and that a reading of either one requires a reading of the two together.
Syllabi by Davy Knittle
Speculating about what the future might hold has long been a strategy employed by marginalized people to imagine other ways of negotiating present dispossession. But speculation is also central to the work of climate scientists, investment bankers, and public health experts. Speculation is often used at cross-purposes. Some speculate to imagine a future that breaks with histories of violence, while others speculate to profit from existing inequalities.
Speculators variously want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, how fast a disease is going to spread, whether we will change our emissions practices or face mass extinction, what an anti-racist society would be like, which stock will be most profitable in six months, who a great-grandparent was and what their life was like, whether a family member with cancer has two years to live, or five, or ten. All of these forms of speculation require different forms of betting on the future, and different ways of using and working with the past.
This workshop-based course considers speculation as a primary strategy for both critical exploration and creative writing. We’ll read speculative fiction that imagines near-futures of our planet, including Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold, Fame, Citrus. We’ll also read ecocritical essays, science writing, U.S. history and historiography, and hybrid works that speculate about the futures of climate change and immigration policy, and the pasts of chattel slavery and the early years of the AIDS pandemic, as well as short critical excerpts from queer and trans theory, Black studies, urban studies, and economics, as we consider the various ends to which speculation is used.
Scalapino and Rich’s poems each describe sexualized experiences of public space in dialogue with the physical transformation of their cities. I use their embodied accounts of sexual responses to urban space to situate a reading of feminist anti-pornography activism within a material attention to cities and their redevelopment. This material attention registers sexuality as part of the sensory data and public life of the city. In short, I use the poems’ focus on the city and its sexualized and rapidly transforming set of spaces to argue that urban sexual history is planning history, and that a reading of either one requires a reading of the two together.
Speculating about what the future might hold has long been a strategy employed by marginalized people to imagine other ways of negotiating present dispossession. But speculation is also central to the work of climate scientists, investment bankers, and public health experts. Speculation is often used at cross-purposes. Some speculate to imagine a future that breaks with histories of violence, while others speculate to profit from existing inequalities.
Speculators variously want to know what the weather is going to be tomorrow, how fast a disease is going to spread, whether we will change our emissions practices or face mass extinction, what an anti-racist society would be like, which stock will be most profitable in six months, who a great-grandparent was and what their life was like, whether a family member with cancer has two years to live, or five, or ten. All of these forms of speculation require different forms of betting on the future, and different ways of using and working with the past.
This workshop-based course considers speculation as a primary strategy for both critical exploration and creative writing. We’ll read speculative fiction that imagines near-futures of our planet, including Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold, Fame, Citrus. We’ll also read ecocritical essays, science writing, U.S. history and historiography, and hybrid works that speculate about the futures of climate change and immigration policy, and the pasts of chattel slavery and the early years of the AIDS pandemic, as well as short critical excerpts from queer and trans theory, Black studies, urban studies, and economics, as we consider the various ends to which speculation is used.