Notes on Vermin (University of Michigan Press, 2025) is an atlas of the literary vermin that appear in modern and contemporary literature, from Franz Kafka’s gigantic insect to Richard Wright’s city rats to Namwali Serpell’s storytelling mosquitoes. As parasites, trespassers, and collectives, vermin animals prove useful to writers who seek to represent life in the margins of power. Drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural studies, eco-Marxism, and biopolitics, this book explores four uses for literary vermin: as figures for the repressed thought, the uncommitted fugitive, the freeloading parasite, and the surplus life. In a series of short, accessible, interlinked essays, Notes on Vermin explores what animal pests can show us about our cultures, our environments, and ourselves.
“Q&A with Notes on Vermin author Caroline Hovanec” (University of Michigan Press blog)
“Florida Universities Must Be Vigilant with AI” (Tampa Bay Times)
“Beholding the Cockroach” (The X-Files Retro Review, Studies in the Fantastic)
“Cats, Lost and Found” (Genealogies of Modernity)
“Only Connecting in Pacific Ocean City” (Post45 Contemporaries)
“A Manifesto for the World as One Finds It” (Public Books)
“Reading Modernism in the Sixth Extinction,” coauthored with Rachel Murray (Modernism/Modernity PrintPlus)
“Earthworm Magic” (Victorian Review blog)
“Well, Has a Single Good Author Ever Owned a Dog?” (Slate)
“Another Nature Speaks to the Camera: Natural History and Film Theory” (Modernism/Modernity PrintPlus)
“Immigrant Birds” (The Rambling)
“Russian Doll – Ariadne” (Directed by Women #Crucial21DbW)
Animal Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 2018) identifies a new understanding of animals in modernist literature and science. Tracking the coevolution of literature and zoology in works by H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and modern scientists including Julian Huxley, Charles Elton, and J. B. S. Haldane, this book shows how new, subject-centered approaches to the study of animals transformed literature and science in the modernist period.
