Book Projects
I am currently at work on two book projects: a monograph and an edited volume.
Writing Claustrophobia
Enclosure and the Emergence of Medicalized Anxiety in France
by Kathryn A. Haklin
Before “claustrophobia” entered medical vocabulary, French writers were already crafting vivid narratives of enclosure and confinement. In Baudelaire’s poetry, the shifting urban landscape of mid-century Paris takes on a suffocating cast, its sky closing over the city like the lid of a coffin. Hugo’s Les Misérables and The Toilers of the Sea, the natural world itself becomes a trap, ensnaring protagonists in deaths by quicksand and drowning. Verne’s extraordinary voyages turn vehicles of exploration into chambers of confinement, whether soaring through outer space or traversing ten thousand leagues beneath the sea. Zola, in turn, cages his characters within the suffocating confines of spaces that define modern life itself: the glittering department store, the rumbling locomotive, and the depths of a coal mine.
Writing Claustrophobia: Enclosure and the Emergence of Medicalized Anxiety in France explores how the cultural imagination of confinement in literature paved the way for the medical definition of “claustrophobia,” coined in 1879 at the Faculté de Médecine in Paris. Even before the term entered medical discourse, French writers were already articulating an emerging anxiety of confinement. In Writing Claustrophobia, I offer historically grounded close readings of works by Baudelaire, Hugo, Verne, and Zola to demonstrate the varied ways in which these authors persistently staged scenes of spatial enclosure. I argue that French writers mobilize what would later be called “claustrophobia” to grapple with the sociopolitical tensions of a rapidly modernizing France, from the pressures of urban renewal and industrial growth to anxieties over environment, empire, and social change.
Research for this project has been generously funded by a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis, a Gilman Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University) and fellowship year at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris - Ulm), and an Alexander Grass Humanities Institute Graduate Fellowship (Johns Hopkins University).
Manuscript currently in preparation.
Image: Charles Marville, Passage de l'Opéra, vue prise de la rue Lepeletier, 9ème arrondissement, Paris. 1865–68. Paris Musées, Public Domain
Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century
Eds. Dominique Bauer, Jill Cornish, Alexandre Dubois, and Kathryn A. Haklin
The edited volume Critical Interiority: Spatial Imagination and Modernity in European Francophone Culture during the Long Nineteenth Century brings together eight chapters that explore space as a porous, liminal, and interstitial category. These spaces emerge not only in the built environment but also in literature, architectural and aesthetic theory, and visual culture from the modern period.
The case studies in this interdisciplinary volume traverse a striking range of modern spatial imaginaries: Maupassant’s soaring Eiffel Tower, Zola’s lush gardens, Khnopff’s dreamlike studio-villa, Boulée’s visionary architecture, and the richly imagined interiors of Verne, Huysmans, and Proust. Across these diverse examples, the chapters show how spatial forms blur rather than uphold familiar dichotomies: interiority/exteriority, public/private, human/non-human, masculine/feminine, nature/culture. Instead of treating space as composed of discrete interiors and exteriors, the volume argues that modernity is shaped by their interpenetration, which produces unsettling and productive paradoxes. Critical Interiority, in this sense, becomes a method for analyzing the relationship between subjectivity and place, while also offering critical insights into questions of gender, temporality, social transformation, and the human-nature entanglement.
This collection brings together researchers working in the United States and Europe whose scholarship interrogates spatial imaginaries across a range of frameworks, including literature, art, cultural history, architectural studies and critical theory.
Manuscript currently under review with Routledge for the Spatial Imageries in Historical Perspective series.
Image: Georges-Félix Garen, Embrasement de la tour Eiffel. 1889. Paris Musées, Public Domain.