Assistant Professor
Department of English
Language and Literature
223 Lake Huron Hall
(616) 331-3052
[email protected]
Tierney Powell
Courses
ENG 215 Foundations of Literary Study: Genre
ENG 216 Fundations of Literary Study: Critical Approaches
ENG 330 Studies in Fiction
ENG 335 Literature of American Minorities
ENG 337 Contemporary Black Literature
ENG 445 Studies in Literary Criticism and Theory
Research Interests
Contemporary Multiethnic Literature, Television, and Film; Critical Supply Chain and Infrastructure Studies; Globalization and Securitization; Environmental Humanities and Freshwater Politics
Recent Publications
Powell, Tierney S. "Organizing Life in the Ruins of Supply-Chain Capitalism." American Book Review, vol. 46 no. 3, 2025, p. 49-53. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/abr.2025.a982128.
Powell, Tierney S. "(Re)mapping the Colonial City: Joy Harjo's Composite Poetic in 'New Orleans.'" Voices and Visions: Essays on New Orleans's Literary History, edited by Leslie Petty and Nancy Dixon, University Press of Mississippi, 2025 — https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/V/Voices-and-Visions
Biography
Tierney S. Powell is Assistant Professor of Multicultural American Literature and member of the Interdisciplinary Cluster for Society, Technology, and the Environment at Grand Valley State University. Her current book project argues that literature, television, and film produce powerful narratives that theorize and imagine alternatives to logistics, the spatial practice and organizational logic undergirding expansive and intensifying global commodity chains and the fossil economies that fuel them. This work extends from her interdisciplinary research and teaching considering literature and the legacies of colonial extraction, trade, and war-making as they inhere in the infrastructures and spatial practices of global cities. She earned her PhD in English from University of Illinois Chicago.
Education
Ph.D., University of Illinois Chicago
M.A., Creighton University
B.A., Creighton University