Janell Tryon is a PhD candidate in English specializing in American Studies.
Can you tell me about your research?
My research started off inquiring about anxieties around homelessness, and what I saw as the institutional perpetuation of homelessness, even under the guise of trying to address factors or predispositions to homelessness. I have a master’s in public health, and coming from the world of public health and particularly in New York where I worked in the Health Department, I was privy to many conversations about “eradicating homelessness” that veered dangerously into the territory of "eradicating those who are homeless." There was a sort of violent impulse in all of those conversations that my team and I witnessed.
When I came to the UMass Amherst English program, my research started to focus around large scale displacements — who gets displaced, who gets moved around, whose lives are considered disposable. I started thinking more broadly about colonialism and how public health in colonial and imperial pursuits was used to designate this disposability, and what was happening domestically in cities as public health agencies were on the rise.
Then I started looking at sanitation. Sanitation was ostensibly about managing waste and keeping our urban and then rural spaces clean, but what I knew from my own experience is that the Department of Sanitation in New York was very much involved in encampment clearances and moving and relocating people who are experiencing homelessness. So, I've started researching essentially the ontological crisis that emerges in sanitized cities — cities that have experienced sanitary movements but also have a consolidated bureaucratic arm of sanitation.
What crisis, then, gets posed in terms of who or what is made waste? How are human subjects made into object waste? Where there are sites of sanitation, there is some sort of ongoing displacement happening — and that broadly gets at the idea that sanitation is being used as a cover. Each of my chapters looks at a different case study site, and the relatively contemporary but historical moment.
What are your case study sites?
My first chapter looks at the Hudson piers, particularly Gansevoort Peninsula and the Whitney Museum’s relocation to that site. In the nineties, there was an encampment there, “the gay camp,” as Sylvia Rivera called it, which was then cleared and made into Gansevoort Peninsula Park. I wrote that chapter through this public art installation, Day’s End, that was created there by David Hammons, to think about what named intentions were in that creation of that sculpture, which in many ways acts as a memorial, and how the city has co-opted the language of what that sculpture was doing to promote this idea of emptiness and cleanliness for the piers. While the Whitney takes great pride — and that’s capital-P Pride — in being a steward of the Greenwich Village area, they also have been responsible for this violent erasure of a queer community that actually was living there and making use of the public space.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 are located at other sites where Sanitation has mined resources and abandoned residents in pursuit of urban revitalization. I analyze literary, visual, and public texts demonstrative of collective resistance to the cycle of urban destruction-and-memorialization. These texts include architecture (Neponsit Tuberculosis Sanitorium), photography (Chris Bernsten; Audrey Snyder and Joe Riley), speculative novels (M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi; Carol Zoref), and performance pieces/anti-art protest (Young Lords; Mierle Laderman Ukeles; and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker).
I am doing site visits, and I talk to people at all of these sites. Ethnography and site visits are really important for my work.
You mentioned your research is also shaped by your previous experience of working in public health?
Totally. In the beginning of my time here, I shied away from talking about my master's in public health, because I wanted to be taken seriously as somebody who's doing literary analysis and who is firmly rooted in humanities. As I've spent more time here, I realized the only way I would have arrived at these research questions and this dissertation project is because of that public health work. And, so, I talk about it a lot now because what I witnessed firsthand — the conversations I had on the daily there, and the way that the city is kind of permitted to use public space and the way it's deciding who and what gets to thrive and count — those questions really haunted me, and I'm trying to answer them in each of my chapters.
Was your undergraduate degree in English?
Yes, I did English and gender and sexuality studies as an undergrad. Public health emerged from the work that I started doing after college, and then I just realized I was such an oddball in public health. I didn't feel like I was ever asking the questions the way people wanted me to ask the questions. I was really distracted by narrative — why do we use certain terms, why does this exist in the first place, and what's the historical backdrop here? At some point, I realized I was just going to have to go somewhere else to answer those questions.
Do you have advice for graduate students who are interested in interdisciplinary work?
Questions of method and archive are really slippery, and I think it's good to ask yourself those questions really early on, and continuously go back to them. We had a great conversation about this at the fall 2024 Methods Symposium, and I think that what we have in common in this department is that we all do close reading. But I also think a lot of us are doing other methods, and are getting to our work through other ways. It's okay to play with method.
I was very intimidated by these questions that I thought everyone else must have already figured out. And it took me a long time to realize that, no, my friends and colleagues were asking themselves the same questions. Even our faculty mentors and advisors return to these questions again and again. So, I'm trying to be a lot less fearful of what I should already know, and try to have more conversations about what I don't yet know, and how I could know it in new ways.