People

Cassie Schifman works on adaptation studies and contemporary media with a focus on genre fiction, popular culture, and new digital texts. She is particularly interested in the overlap between adaptational strategies and questions of gender and sexuality, and she has written on topics from contemporary children's literature to the fanfiction afterlives of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Richardson's Clarissa. For purely selfish reasons, she is also curious about the textual status of material items, crafting practices, and other atypical forms of literary engagement. 

A multi-generation Tejano from Houston, TX, where the oil and gas industry is foremost, I am interested in the impact of modern extraction economies on cultural production and organization. Broadly, I look at how the apex of 19th century European imperialism encoded extractive modes across the globe that we are still grappling with today. From this top-down viewpoint, my research seeks to locate areas of tension and resistance to the imperialist, homogenizing project. How, when, and where were there efforts to subvert or convert the economic rationales of extraction and how do these alternatives offer a different 'world' in which to exist is the key question I seek to answer.

I am also affiliated with the Rutgers Translation Studies Initiative. For more information on how my literary work intersects with Translation Studies you can click here.