Profile

About me

My name is Miranda Steege. I’m a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at UC Riverside, where I work in queer theory and Victorian studies. My work investigates queer forms of sex and selfhood via c19 texts and contemporary fanfiction. I also have a B.F.A. in theatre directing; I have taught theatre to children ages 4-17 and writing and literature to college-age students. I’ve posted lot of fanfiction on ao3.

The project

A novel! Literary criticism! Fic! Tumblrs! All these things and more! Project may include: ghosts; murder; Hannibal fanfiction; detectives making out; formal experimentation; nineteenth-century female protagonists; academics arguing about stuff; and Captain America’s butt.

My dissertation project combines multiple genres of writing: literary and cultural criticism, a mystery novel, personal writing, and fanfiction. It is a work of experimental criticism meant to hold up as both scholarship and fiction.

The novel (working title “Mystery Dissertation Project”) takes place in a dysfunctional English department in a fictional Pittsburgh university. The novel’s central figure, a Ph.D. student named Lu Fairchild, is writing a dissertation about sex, selfhood, and Victorian Spiritualism, all in relation to contemporary erotic fanfiction. As I am writing the novel, I am also writing Lu’s dissertation—as well as running her Tumblr and posting fanfiction under her name. [UPDATE: Tumblr is being terrible, so I'm unsure of the future of this project there.]

BUT WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS

I write about forms of sex and forms of selfhood. Because so much of my work is engaged with form and structure, I want to pay particular attention to the form and structure of the dissertation rather than viewing it as a transparent, unacknowledged container for content. Producing a variety of linked forms of writing also offers opportunities to connect with a variety of different kinds of audiences (hi tumblr!). I want my work to be rigorous and intellectual, but also to strain at the seams of any given genre or platform it attempts to occupy.

As such, the project attempts to actually undertake the experiences of queer selfhood & sociality that that it studies & describes—experiences, by and large, of straining at the seams. Writing a dissertation and a novel in conjunction, particularly a mystery novel, which requires careful plotting and planning, is an often frustrating and difficult writing situation. This is part of the point. The work of the dissertation is to rethink the way we conceptualize the self formally: describing a mode of queer selfhood invested in interiorized, carefully guarded feeling, and then considering the political, personal, and social stakes of treasuring, complicating, and violating this form of the self. A self that wants to be isolated and in control but that also yearns to be forcefully opened up or dissolved links desire and pain, pleasure and shame, privacy and exhibitionism; the experience of allowing something else to invade or dismantle the interiorized self is frustrating and painful, and it undermines the self’s agency even when it is desired. My process formally replicates that experience by refusing to allow either the dissertation or the novel to be self-contained. They have to evolve mutually, a change to one triggering a change in the other. Their competing needs struggle with each other even as they open each other up. The dictates of fiction and academic writing will have to come to an uneasy balance—probably by performing their own conflict.

The blog

This blog is where I update readers on the project: I will post reflections on the writing project, excerpts, links to related materials, and maybe some cool gifs.