Megan Zeitz

Research Interests / Recherche

Megan holds a Bachelor's degree in English and history, and a Master’s degree in English, both from the University of Geneva. Her Master’s mémoire, “Season of Missed Time: Autumnal Aesthetics and Temporality of Suspension in British Romantic Writings (1815 - 1820)”—which was awarded the Marcel Compagnon Prize in the Western languages, literatures, and civilizations category in 2022—argues that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Jane Austen's Persuasion (1818), and John Keats's To Autumn (1820) use autumnal aesthetics as a means of responding to, and engaging with the temporality of acceleration and contingency, as well as the climate of elusiveness and uncertainty of the age 1815 – 1820.

Her current research, which she is doing for Professor Madsen’s SNSF-founded research project  Vegan Literary Studies: An American Textual History, 1776-1900, focuses on nineteenth-century vegan-adjacent communities in the United States. In general, she is interested in the poetics of attention in nineteenth-century British and American loco-descriptive writings, in relation to environmental aesthetics, melancholy, and creativity, using ecocritical and phenomenological frameworks.

In addition to her work as a researcher for the Vegan Literary Studies project, this semester, Megan teaches the BA7 seminar “American Literary Counter-Voices.” From 2018 to 2020, she worked as a tutor at the Writing Lab, and in the Autumn 2023 semester, she taught undergraduate academic essay-writing at the English Department of the University of Lausanne.