English and Comparative Literature

sdegooyer@unc.edu

Stephanie DeGooyer is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research examines intersections between law and literature, with interests in immigration, migration, human rights and humanitarianism, and history of disease and global health. Dr. DeGooyer teaches classes on law and literature, human rights, Medical Humanities, and theories and the history of the novel.

Her book, Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization, (JHUP, 2022), follows how naturalization evolved in England against the backdrop of imperial expansion and laid the groundwork for a dramatically new vision of subjecthood and nationality. I am currently working on two projects: Asylum Nation: Refugees and the Founding of America, which traces the colonial history of legal concepts such as “asylum” and “refugees” in British common law and early American legal and literary history, and a book project on the history and social function of unidentified bodily remains. Dr. DeGooyer is co-author of The Right to Have Rights (Verso Books, 2018), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to the Novel (forthcoming 2023). She has written on a variety of topics – immigration, borders, vaccines, disease, and literature – for The Nation, Guardian, Dissent, Boston Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Humanity, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books.

Before coming to UNC, Dr. DeGooyer held a visiting assistant professorship at Harvard University and an assistant professorship at Willamette University. From 2018-2019, I was the Frieda L. Miller fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and, from 2020-2021, an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow at UCLA.