Susan Zieger
Biographic Data
| ID | 3624829 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Susan Zieger |
| GIVEN NAMES | Susan |
| FAMILY NAME | Zieger |
| SIGNATURE | ZIEGER S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Riverside |
| ORCID | 0009-0007-9298-7111 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 2 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Houdini and the magic of logistics
Dracula's Cold-Chain
Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker'…
Afterword
The afterword draws out the political stakes of the recent expansion of critical infrastructure studies. Describing the articles’ interventions, it explains how nineteenth-century studies is well positioned to engage infrastructure to perform vital progressive scholarship
Fake goods
The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems unreal is a material truth. Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. Blockchain technology promises to help stem the deluge of counterfeit products, but the Blockchain dream also reminds us that logistics is an imperfect performative art. The material good becomes the unreal figure, while airy speculation assumes greater predictability. All that is solid melts into air, but all that…
Opium and Logistical Nightmares
This essay argues that opium’s pivotal role in nineteenth-century political economy and aesthetics constructed addiction as a relationship between labor and capital that has persisted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discourses on opium addiction frame it as a crisis of sovereignty for individuals and masses in ways that veil its relationships to labor, collectivity, and community. Yet addiction arise…
Back on the Chain Gang
This essay explores the road and the chain as material and ideological forms of logistical and infrastructural power. Focusing on threechain gang narratives, John L. Spivak's Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang (1932), Elliot Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain (1932), and its film adaptation, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932), the essay shows how these white-authored stories imagine the extraction of Black male labor in the cons…
Assembly Codes
Miss X,” Telepathy, and Affect at Fin De Siècle
In his book Apparitions and Thought-Transference : An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy (1895), Frank Podmore relates what might at first seem a humdrum occurrence of settling into bedtime reading. The diary he has transcribed, of a woman he calls D, records on January 6th, “Tried several books . . . finally took to ‘Villette.’” But D’s choice was not completely autonomous. She was clearly influenced by her friend, “X.” As Podmore wrote, …
Logistics
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Supernatural Entertainments
The appearance since 1990 of so many excellent books about Spiritualism—Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room, Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits, Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World, Marlene Tromp’s Altered State
Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919
Holmes's Pipe, Tobacco Papers and the Nineteenth-century Origins of Media Addiction
This article offers a new perspective on the literary character Sherlock Holmes, who, though often noted for his cocaine and morphine injections, was actually more significantly dependent on tobacco smoking and printed matter for mental stimulation. Interpreting the pipe as metaphor and metonym for print, and noting his dependency on it to solve his cases, the article proposes Holmes as an early example of the figure of the media addict. It draws…
The Case of William Seabrook
The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working Dead Susan Zieger (bio) In 1930 in Paris, the avant-garde journal Documents published photographs of a head and neck wearing an eyeless black leather mask and studded collar. (Figure 1). As the accompanying article, "Le Caput Mortuum, ou, la Femme de l'Alchimiste" by Michel Leiris notes, the mask was conceived and commissioned in New York by the American adventurer and writer William…
From Decadence to Popular Fiction
Inventing the Addict
This book reconstructs the literary and cultural history of addiction from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. notion of addiction has always conjured first-person stories, often beginning with an insidious seduction, followed by compulsion and despair, culminating in recovery and tentative hope for the future. We are all familiar with this form of individual life narrative, Susan Zieger observes, but we know far less about its history. 'Add…
Impostors of Freedom
The essay examines the first U.S. novel about hypodermic morphine addiction, Edward Payson Roe's Without a Home (1881) in the context of the broader cultural history of addiction. When habituation to hypodermic morphine became a noted phenomenon in the years following the Civil War, writers described it by the temperance movement's familiar metaphor for habituation to alcohol: self-enslavement. “Opium slaves” joined the ranks of figurative “slave…
How Far am I Responsible
TW ^ Then the governess Isabel Gordon recounts her introduction to the hypodermic injection of morphine in Richard Pryce's novel An Evil Spirit, she poses a challenge to the readers of her fictional diary. By requesting them to assign her responsibility for her morphine habituation to a precise moment in her narrative, the text defies them to assign responsibility to her at all. The idea that someone might not be responsible for such actions, but…
Fake goods
The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems unreal is a material truth. Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. Blockchain technology promises to help stem the deluge of counterfeit products, but the Blockchain dream also reminds us that logistics is an imperfect performative art. The material good becomes the unreal figure, while airy speculation assumes greater predictability. All that is solid melts into air, but all that…
Supernatural Entertainments
The appearance since 1990 of so many excellent books about Spiritualism—Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room, Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits, Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World, Marlene Tromp’s Altered State
How Far am I Responsible
TW ^ Then the governess Isabel Gordon recounts her introduction to the hypodermic injection of morphine in Richard Pryce's novel An Evil Spirit, she poses a challenge to the readers of her fictional diary. By requesting them to assign her responsibility for her morphine habituation to a precise moment in her narrative, the text defies them to assign responsibility to her at all. The idea that someone might not be responsible for such actions, but…
Inventing the Addict
This book reconstructs the literary and cultural history of addiction from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. notion of addiction has always conjured first-person stories, often beginning with an insidious seduction, followed by compulsion and despair, culminating in recovery and tentative hope for the future. We are all familiar with this form of individual life narrative, Susan Zieger observes, but we know far less about its history. 'Add…
Impostors of Freedom
The essay examines the first U.S. novel about hypodermic morphine addiction, Edward Payson Roe's Without a Home (1881) in the context of the broader cultural history of addiction. When habituation to hypodermic morphine became a noted phenomenon in the years following the Civil War, writers described it by the temperance movement's familiar metaphor for habituation to alcohol: self-enslavement. “Opium slaves” joined the ranks of figurative “slave…
From Decadence to Popular Fiction
The Case of William Seabrook
The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working Dead Susan Zieger (bio) In 1930 in Paris, the avant-garde journal Documents published photographs of a head and neck wearing an eyeless black leather mask and studded collar. (Figure 1). As the accompanying article, "Le Caput Mortuum, ou, la Femme de l'Alchimiste" by Michel Leiris notes, the mask was conceived and commissioned in New York by the American adventurer and writer William…
Addiction and British Visual Culture, 1751–1919
Holmes's Pipe, Tobacco Papers and the Nineteenth-century Origins of Media Addiction
This article offers a new perspective on the literary character Sherlock Holmes, who, though often noted for his cocaine and morphine injections, was actually more significantly dependent on tobacco smoking and printed matter for mental stimulation. Interpreting the pipe as metaphor and metonym for print, and noting his dependency on it to solve his cases, the article proposes Holmes as an early example of the figure of the media addict. It draws…
Supernatural Entertainments
The appearance since 1990 of so many excellent books about Spiritualism—Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room, Ann Braude’s Radical Spirits, Janet Oppenheim’s The Other World, Marlene Tromp’s Altered State
Miss X,” Telepathy, and Affect at Fin De Siècle
In his book Apparitions and Thought-Transference : An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy (1895), Frank Podmore relates what might at first seem a humdrum occurrence of settling into bedtime reading. The diary he has transcribed, of a woman he calls D, records on January 6th, “Tried several books . . . finally took to ‘Villette.’” But D’s choice was not completely autonomous. She was clearly influenced by her friend, “X.” As Podmore wrote, …
Logistics
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button
Assembly Codes
Opium and Logistical Nightmares
This essay argues that opium’s pivotal role in nineteenth-century political economy and aesthetics constructed addiction as a relationship between labor and capital that has persisted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century. Nineteenth-century discourses on opium addiction frame it as a crisis of sovereignty for individuals and masses in ways that veil its relationships to labor, collectivity, and community. Yet addiction arise…
Back on the Chain Gang
This essay explores the road and the chain as material and ideological forms of logistical and infrastructural power. Focusing on threechain gang narratives, John L. Spivak's Hard Times on a Southern Chain Gang (1932), Elliot Burns's I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain (1932), and its film adaptation, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang! (1932), the essay shows how these white-authored stories imagine the extraction of Black male labor in the cons…
Afterword
The afterword draws out the political stakes of the recent expansion of critical infrastructure studies. Describing the articles’ interventions, it explains how nineteenth-century studies is well positioned to engage infrastructure to perform vital progressive scholarship
Fake goods
The early 2020s commonplace that everything seems unreal is a material truth. Advances in logistics are generating more counterfeits. Blockchain technology promises to help stem the deluge of counterfeit products, but the Blockchain dream also reminds us that logistics is an imperfect performative art. The material good becomes the unreal figure, while airy speculation assumes greater predictability. All that is solid melts into air, but all that…
Dracula's Cold-Chain
Logistics is the science and art of moving goods, people, and information efficiently to maximize profit; though it has become synonymous with the rise of the shipping container, its history is as old as trade itself. At the end of the nineteenth century, the ancient human action of loading and shipping boxes became part of a globalizing network of refrigerated supply chains and transoceanic shipping. Appearing briefly as a detail in Bram Stoker'…
Houdini and the magic of logistics
Art (10 works) · History (9 works) · Literature (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · History (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Psychology (6 works) · Business (4 works) · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis (4 works)