Emily Naser-Hall
Doctoral Candidate and Attorney at Law
University of Kentucky, Department of English
1215 Patterson Office Tower, Lexington KY 40506
Email: ena225@uky.edu
About Me
Emily Naser-Hall is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky. She earned a BA from Tulane University, a Juris Doctor from DePaul College of Law, an LL.M. in National Security Law from Georgetown, and an MA in Literature from Northwestern University. Her research interests include post-1945 American literature and film, gothic narratives, and the intersection of law and literature.
Her work has been published in Studies in the American Short Story, Popular Culture Studies Journal, Proceedings of the Third Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference, Tulane Journal of International Law, the DePaul Journal for Social Justice, and the Proceedings of the Third Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference. Her work on marital rape and 1980s witchcraft films will appear in the upcoming collected volume Screening #MeToo: Rape Culture in Hollywood. Her public scholarship has also appeared with Horror Homeroom, ASAP/J, and Certified Forgotten.
Latest Publication
"Lottery in June: Ritualistic Collapse of Mimetic Temporality in 1940s Law and Literature"
The relationship between narrative dissonance within the consonance of time and the simultaneous collapse of temporal chronology has been widely explored in classical theories of narratology. However, these perspectives have not adequately addressed how texts that destabilize these aspects respond to their historical and legal contexts, particularly as they engage with the symbolic significance of ritualistic practices. In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson's use of ritual allows literary representations of contemporaneousness to comment on the value of legal renderings in crimes of international magnitude. Specifically, the simultaneous circulation of past, present, and future comments upon the legal function of rites in the context of the cultural accounts surrounding the 1945–1946 Nuremberg Trials. Viewing the popular perception of the event as a legal ritualization of past severe crimes with the purpose of projecting humanity's response to atrocities reveals how 1940s postwar literary accounts use ceremony to question the value of international legal prosecutions by challenging the boundaries between eras.
Emily Naser-Hall
University of Kentucky, Department of English
1215 Patterson Office Tower
Lexington, KY 40506