Research
Alexandra Lee Meany specializes in 20th and 21st-century Multi-Ethnic U.S. Literature and the Urban Humanities. Her research examines how the U.S. city shapes and is shaped by colonialism and racial domination.
Book Project: Urban Refusal: Race and the Colonialism of Renewal
Urban Refusal radically reframes the way Americanists think about a major period of urban history by showing how racist redevelopment follows the script of settler colonialism. Rather than a social scientific or purely historical approach, Urban Refusal uses methods in the urban humanities, which bridges literary studies and urban studies, to examine how novels provide a heretofore unexamined window into conquest in the postwar city.
Publication: “Spatializing Racial Difference and Geographic Struggle in Paul Beatty’s Los Angeles”
This article, published in a special issue of Pacific Coast Philology (Winter 2026), argues that Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout advances a historically attuned account of the link between “race” and space in the city.
Publication: “Tucson, City of Thieves:” Biocapitalism and Land Dispossession in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
This article, published in MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (Winter 2025), engages two hitherto under-examined threads in Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead: (1) the figure of the “urban Indian” and (2) Indigenous critiques of biocapitalism. It argues that theft of human blood for profit and the accumulation of land for real estate development are linked forces of colonial racial capitalism’s violence and expansion visible in the historical geography of Tucson.
For a complete list of past research projects and conference presentations contact alexmeany5@gmail.com.