Daniel Leonard

What do moments of encounter with nonhuman animals teach us about the self? When we trade gazes with a dog or listen to a bird as it listens to us, we are invited to discover the relationality and capacity for mutuality that we and many other creatures fundamentally share. By depicting such moments, literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries conceives of the human self with boundaries that do not coincide with an isolated individual body and mind. My research examines poetic and fictional narratives of responsive relationship between human and nonhuman companion species in hope of giving voice to the growing modern awareness that, as posthumanist scholar Donna Haraway writes, “We make each other up, in the flesh, significantly other to each other.”

I argue that “making each other up” entails a self that is fragmented inwardly—for example, through what psychoanalyst Melanie Klein calls splitting and projective identification—as well as integrated outwardly—for example, through what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn calls a distributed self. My research explores how, as literary modernism addresses questions of self by depicting animal encounters, it articulates a relational self by using language in innovative ways that point toward the beyond-linguistic communication and communion shared between human and nonhuman minds.

Education

Ph.D. in English and American Literature, Boston University, in progress
M.A. in English and American Literature, Boston University, 2018
M.F.A. in Creative Writing – Poetry, Boston University, 2015
M.A. in Philosophy, University of Leuven, 2012
B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies, Wheaton College (IL), 2010

Postgraduate Fellowship, Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, 2020-22

For conference presentations, courses taught, honors, publications, and other information, please see my CV.