Lenora Hanson earned their Masters degree from the Department of English in 2009, where they built foundations in both British Romanticism and critical theory before pursuing their Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Hanson specializes in Romanticism, political economy, biopolitics, and the emergence of the life sciences, and has been active in organizing autonomous political spaces, including the MLA Subconference, the #Ferguson2MLA march, and the graduate student labor union at UW-Madison. In Fall 2017, they joined the English faculty at New York University as an assistant professor.
During their last semester at UW-Madison, Hanson completed their dissertation with a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Entitled Riotous Life: The Rhetoric and Politics of Romantic Organisms, it argues for an important affinity between figures of nonhuman life and riotous political events throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Insisting on the negativity that the nonhuman indexes in Romanticism, their project looks to writing on food riots, slave marronage, anti-nationalism and communism in which figures of machines, plants and animals trace the destruction of the human as the horizon of radical politics.