Bio:
Liz Polcha (she/they) is an assistant professor of English and Digital Humanities. Their research examines race, gender, and sexuality in print and visual culture from the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. Liz’s book project, Venus in Transit: Gendered Violence and the Production of Natural History, argues that natural history became a discipline in the eighteenth century through a culture of sexual exploitation. Each chapter untangles the genres of natural history as intelligence gathering for empire, from woodcut engravings typologizing women’s bodies to Linnaean taxonomy and racial classification schemes circulated in print culture. Through this analysis of form and genre, Venus in Transit centers the fragmented narratives of women and girls in the margins of naturalist record keeping, from the Caribbean, West Africa, the South Pacific archipelago, and North and South America. In 2024, Liz was awarded an ACLS fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) to support her research towards Venus in Transit. Liz’s research has also been supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the John Carter Brown library, and the American Antiquarian Society.
Liz's commitment to confronting the colonial archives of literature and science stems from her digital humanities scholarship. They have contributed to the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, the Women Writers Project, and Our Marathon: the Boston Bombing Digital Archive. Liz co-founded Insurrect! Radical Thinking in Early American Studies, an open access digital publication run by early career scholars that centers Black and Indigenous liberation frameworks in Early American Studies. Before joining Drexel, Liz was an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern Mississippi. At USM, she helped launch the Center for Digital Humanities and taught foundational graduate courses, including "Introduction to Digital Humanities and a DH practicum, "Digital Archival Power." In partnership with the CDH, Liz also collaborated with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History on a digital exhibit on Black photography and the history of slavery in Mound Bayou, Mississippi.