Academic Personal Statement

Personal Statement for Graduate School (modified for blog)

March 17, 2019

I became interested in the narratives of infrastructure after spending three weeks of my 2016 summer under a bridge in downtown Chicago, counting buckets of rock that would become stone columns under an exit ramp from the Dan Ryan Expressway. The July sun baked the air into a thick, Midwestern concoction of generator and engine exhaust, humidity, and dust. The superintendent, an aging man with a handlebar mustache and long hair, muttered longingly about his upcoming multi-week boating trip through the Great Lakes. It sounded fresh, clean, and utterly dissimilar to his life in construction. This experience prompted me to think critically about narratives and relationships surrounding the built environment, the landscapes on which infrastructure is built, and the landscapes which infrastructure creates.

Later that year, I took an overnight train to Minot, North Dakota, to visit the prairie. While O.E. Rölvaag’s characters in his immigrant trilogy, the subject of a paper I wrote in undergrad, wrestled with a difficult character, I welcomed the chance to see the openness. I had found a place which I imagined to be quiet. Yet, as I stood before the Garrison Dam, it seemed as though I could hear Jefferson, Powell, the Three Tribes, and the Corps of Engineers. The dam became an imposing display of one particular narrative about the western landscape; the others, remembered in words. To further research this idea, and similar ideas, I plan to study twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, especially literature of the frontier and narratives of progress, and to document progress and discoveries on this blog.

I want to explore how engineered structures act as characters in novels, how engineers’ personalities are portrayed, and to what degree period rhetoric, both when the novels were written and when they are set, influence plot and theme in novels such as Ivan Doig’s Bucking the Sun, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose, or Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. More broadly, my interests include travel writing, particularly transcontinental journeys, and social narratives encouraging sustainable design. I anticipate that these questions also require an understanding of Native American literature, nineteenth century American literature, cultural geography, and the technical and political systems which influence how infrastructures are designed and financed.

I look forward to discussing, through this blog and through conversation, not only how infrastructure is portrayed in literature, but also how current political discussions and public opinions regarding sustainability affect infrastructure rehabilitation and construction. This study is relevant because the ways in which we talk about infrastructure, our understandings of political structures and how and how much we care about the environment, affect what infrastructures are built. The capacity and availability of infrastructure affect our abilities to do anything else; to build a business, to visit family, to spend time in nature. Perhaps more importantly, the infrastructures we choose to build affect what resources and opportunities are available for future generations.