Lauren Benjamin is a PhD candidate in the departments of Comparative Literature and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. She has also completed certificates in Judaic Studies and Graduate Teaching. Her primary research fields are gender studies, animal studies, and 20th century modernisms. Her work revolves around US-American, Caribbean, Yiddish, French, and Polish literatures. She is currently a graduate fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities.
Her dissertation, Feral Modernisms, unsettles binaries between domestic and wild in order to probe modernist literature’s precarious engagement with home and domestic space. Using the concept of ferality as its guide, Feral Modernisms shows that modernist literature is profoundly concerned with domination and entrapment, longing and belonging, precarity and permanence.