Susan Lepselter
Biographic Data
| ID | 84249 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Lepselter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Lepselter |
| SIGNATURE | LEPSELTER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Indiana University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-4004-225X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 25 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Earth Anxieties
As things shifted, as a pressure built, we felt it more and more. There seemed to be moments of a reckoning. The earth was humming, a ubiquitous, invasive low-frequency sound emanating from somewhere unknown. In Taos, New Mexico, the hum was christened with its most famous place name, but similar reverberations filled the air in other places too: the United Kingdom and Australia. Only a few humans could hear it, but everyone heard about it. Quest…
Notes towards an Afterword
This afterword performs a contradiction. It simultaneously describes a theoretical argument against finalization while serving as a type of conclusion to "Hundreds for Katie," a multi-authored, curated project engaging and honoring the influential work and mentorship of Kathleen Stewart upon her recent retirement from the University of Texas. "Hundreds for Katie" is a collaborative endeavor and comprises various experimental, often personal, styl…
Situating Conspiracy Theory
When I met her 20 years ago, she was drifting around the country looking for her father, not that man from her family but her biological father whom she’d never been allowed to meet. She was now in
At the Edge of Chaos
Although we often use the term "monster" in a self-evident way, what that term signifies is highly varied and sometimes contradictory. What, in fact, is a monster? This paper explores various beings called "monsters," from obese bodies on reality TV to occult lizard people in conspiracy theories. Taking off from classic anthropological theories of monsters as deconstructed and reassembled natural objects, I question their affective and meaningful…
Take me up, I want to go
Captivity narratives have been a core American genre for centuries. This paper suggests that some American captivity narratives are opening into emergent attempts to articulate social feeling at a moment of precarity. I treat captivity here not just as a narrative, genre or trope but also as an affect. I explore how neurodivergent young people evoke disorientation and captivity on Tumblr as an expression of identity. I show how the bloggers share…
Susan Lepselter on Her Prize-Winning Book
The Resonance of Unseen Things
The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the "uncanny" persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuse…
The resonance of captivity
The trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls "resonance," especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various eth…
The Disorder of Things
In recent years, a rise of mediated popular narratives portrays hoarders as disconnected from normal social life. Hoarders, shown as suffering from both pathological practices of overconsumption and from the inability to complete the normative purchasing cycle of disposal and re-consumption, are commonly linked to discourses of addiction. I analyze how these mediated narratives present hoarders in all the spectacular chaos of their isolation, and…
E. T. Culture
From the Earth Native's Point of View
Research Article| May 01 1997 From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Extraterrestrial, and the Natural Ground of Home Susan Lepselter Susan Lepselter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 197–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-197 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Susan Lepselter; From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Ext…
The Disorder of Things
In recent years, a rise of mediated popular narratives portrays hoarders as disconnected from normal social life. Hoarders, shown as suffering from both pathological practices of overconsumption and from the inability to complete the normative purchasing cycle of disposal and re-consumption, are commonly linked to discourses of addiction. I analyze how these mediated narratives present hoarders in all the spectacular chaos of their isolation, and…
From the Earth Native's Point of View
Research Article| May 01 1997 From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Extraterrestrial, and the Natural Ground of Home Susan Lepselter Susan Lepselter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 197–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-197 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Susan Lepselter; From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Ext…
The resonance of captivity
The trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls "resonance," especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various eth…
Take me up, I want to go
Captivity narratives have been a core American genre for centuries. This paper suggests that some American captivity narratives are opening into emergent attempts to articulate social feeling at a moment of precarity. I treat captivity here not just as a narrative, genre or trope but also as an affect. I explore how neurodivergent young people evoke disorientation and captivity on Tumblr as an expression of identity. I show how the bloggers share…
From the Earth Native's Point of View
Research Article| May 01 1997 From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Extraterrestrial, and the Natural Ground of Home Susan Lepselter Susan Lepselter Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 197–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-197 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Susan Lepselter; From the Earth Native's Point of View: The Earth, the Ext…
E. T. Culture
The Disorder of Things
In recent years, a rise of mediated popular narratives portrays hoarders as disconnected from normal social life. Hoarders, shown as suffering from both pathological practices of overconsumption and from the inability to complete the normative purchasing cycle of disposal and re-consumption, are commonly linked to discourses of addiction. I analyze how these mediated narratives present hoarders in all the spectacular chaos of their isolation, and…
The resonance of captivity
The trope of containment forms a persistent undercurrent in dominant discourses of American freedom. This article describes and performs this trope through the intertextual poetics of stories about captivity, focusing on what the author here calls "resonance," especially between historical American Indian captivity narratives and UFO abduction accounts. Throughout this article, the idea of the uncanny is used as a way to think through various eth…
The Resonance of Unseen Things
The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the "uncanny" persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuse…
Susan Lepselter on Her Prize-Winning Book
At the Edge of Chaos
Although we often use the term "monster" in a self-evident way, what that term signifies is highly varied and sometimes contradictory. What, in fact, is a monster? This paper explores various beings called "monsters," from obese bodies on reality TV to occult lizard people in conspiracy theories. Taking off from classic anthropological theories of monsters as deconstructed and reassembled natural objects, I question their affective and meaningful…
Take me up, I want to go
Captivity narratives have been a core American genre for centuries. This paper suggests that some American captivity narratives are opening into emergent attempts to articulate social feeling at a moment of precarity. I treat captivity here not just as a narrative, genre or trope but also as an affect. I explore how neurodivergent young people evoke disorientation and captivity on Tumblr as an expression of identity. I show how the bloggers share…
Situating Conspiracy Theory
When I met her 20 years ago, she was drifting around the country looking for her father, not that man from her family but her biological father whom she’d never been allowed to meet. She was now in
Notes towards an Afterword
This afterword performs a contradiction. It simultaneously describes a theoretical argument against finalization while serving as a type of conclusion to "Hundreds for Katie," a multi-authored, curated project engaging and honoring the influential work and mentorship of Kathleen Stewart upon her recent retirement from the University of Texas. "Hundreds for Katie" is a collaborative endeavor and comprises various experimental, often personal, styl…
Earth Anxieties
As things shifted, as a pressure built, we felt it more and more. There seemed to be moments of a reckoning. The earth was humming, a ubiquitous, invasive low-frequency sound emanating from somewhere unknown. In Taos, New Mexico, the hum was christened with its most famous place name, but similar reverberations filled the air in other places too: the United Kingdom and Australia. Only a few humans could hear it, but everyone heard about it. Quest…
Sociology (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Literature (6 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · History (4 works) · History (4 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis (3 works) · Narrative (3 works)