Early on in his time at Rice as a graduate student in the department of English, Kevin MacDonnell became interested in the fact that many environmental scientists and historians identify the 18th century — specifically the invention of James Watt’s steam engine in 1784 — as the beginning of the Anthropocene and thus, our ongoing environmental crises.
In his award-winning paper, “Aesthetics in the Enlightenment Anthropocene: The Limits of Geometry in Eighteenth-Century British Design,” MacDonnell studies the different aesthetic, social and cultural forms embedded in the design of the steam engine. His research took him to the Library of Birmingham in England, where by studying Watt’s archived papers, he concluded that the engine’s design didn’t emerge from a moment of inventive genius, but was actually a product of its cultural moment in the Age of Enlightenment.
"The question I was asking throughout my early years in the PhD program, and then what this paper ended up being about, has to do with identifying what kind of social and cultural forms were underlying the development of the steam engine,” he says. “By assigning the steam engine with this monumental place in environmental history, I felt like we were kind of ignoring a lot of the other actors at play in creating our current environmental moment.”
MacDonnell graduated with a B.A in English from Virginia Tech, and earned his master’s degree from St. John’s University. It was there that MacDonnell was steered toward Rice by St. John's faculty; with a reputation for environmental humanities and ecocriticism, Rice’s English PhD program was a natural fit for MacDonnell’s research interests. Sarah Ellenzweig, associate professor of English and a specialist in Enlightenment studies as well as science and culture studies, nominated MacDonnell’s work for the Greene Prize.
"It was a fascinating essay that's in the context of that larger question: at what moment in history did we decide that innovation was a good thing, and what are some of the consequences of that?” says Joseph Campana, the Alan Dugald McKillop Professor of English and director of the Center for Environmental Studies. “How do things like literature and culture interact with science and technology?”
The paper is just one chapter in MacDonnell’s dissertation titled “Innovating the Enlightenment”, which will examine different technological innovations that facilitated the industrial era and by extension produced our current environmental moment. “People don't really look at the history of technology and the history of literature as having anything to do with one another, but what I'm trying to do in the dissertation is show how writers and artists were very much in conversation with engineers and inventors.”
After completing his doctorate at Rice, MacDonnell hopes to continue his research in environmental humanities with a postdoctoral fellowship and eventually pursue academic tenure.