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Olivia Badoi, Ph.D.


Department of English

Education

Ph.D. in English, Fordham University
M.A. in English, Wroclaw University
B.A. in American Studies, University of Bucharest

Practice Areas

  • Visual and Literary Modernism
  • Graphic Narrative Studies
  • Ecocriticism

Research Interests

  • Dr. Badoi is currently working on her first book, Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book, an ecocritical examination of the woodcut novel, a type of wordless book that was widely popular in both Europe and the United States throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The book proposes an original framework of "arboreal modernism" to illuminate how artists used nonhuman networks such as trees and forests as a model for interconnectivity and a corrective for a own broken social system. Crafted out of wood, with pages densely populated with trees, the woodcut book embodies a living relation between nature and culture.

Publications and Media Placements

  • Badoi, Olivia. Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book (book under contract)
  • Badoi, Olivia. "Beyond Free Willy: Orcas, Resistance, and the Spirit of the Sea," Haunted Shores (September 2023).
  • Badoi, Olivia, and Eliza Andreasen. "The many eyes of desire: a first-time English translation of Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's short story Closeness," Feminist Modernist Studies, 6:3, 255-268 (2023). DOI: 10.1080/24692921.2022.2120726
  • Badoi, Olivia. "A Feeling for Wood Itself: Lynd Ward's Arboreal Modernism," Modernism/Modernity: Print Plus (July 2021). https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0207 
  • Badoi, Olivia. "Writer's (Wood)block," Modernism/Modernity: Print Plus (September 2017).
Selected conferences and presentations

  • "From Lost Giraffes to Ghost Foxes: Narratives of Authenticity and the Liminality of Animal Representation in Screen Media," The Factual Animal, University of Valencia (2023).
  • "Human and Non-Human Language in Guillermo del Toro's The Murmuring,” Adaptation, SLU Madrid (2023).
  • "The Occult in American Modernism," Eco-anxiety and Spirituality in Literature, Universite Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2023).
  • "Gen Z and the Archetype of the Vampire," Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series, University of Valencia (2022).
  • "Palimpsestic Time in Eric Drooker's Flood!" Landscape, Narrative, and Deep Time, Saint Louis University Madrid (2022).
  • "The Woodcut Novel and the Politics of Form," Modern Language Association Conference, New York City (2018).
  • "Modernism and Materiality in the Woodcut Novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel," Modernist Studies Association Conference, Amsterdam (2017).
  • "Wordless Witness: Emotion as Communication in Wordless Narratives," Modern Language Association Conference, Philadelphia (2017).