Education

2008 University of Florida, B.A. 
2009 Vanderbilt University, M.A.
2013 Vanderbilt University, Ph.D.
CV

Courses Taught

Flashpoints: The Environmental 1960s
Writing and Research
Reading Locally and Globally
Where Are We Now? (Honors)

Career Specialties

Hovanec specializes in environmental humanities, animal studies, and modern and contemporary literature.

Professional and Community Activities

Her first book, Animal Subjects (Cambridge University Press, 2018), argues that writers and scientists in late-19th- and early-20th-century Britain drew on zoological research and experimental literary techniques to create a new cross-disciplinary understanding of animal subjectivity. It reads literary modernists Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and Aldous Huxley in dialogue with the then-new scientific disciplines of comparative psychology, ethology, and animal ecology.

Notes on Vermin (University of Michigan Press, 2025), her second book, is an atlas of rats, cockroaches, pigeons, mosquitoes, worms, and other creepy-crawly animals in 20th- and 21st-century literature. While vermin are obviously objects of disgust, many writers have reclaimed vermin, using them to represent life in the margins of power. Drawing on psychoanalysis, cultural studies, biopolitics, and political ecology, this book explores how literary vermin signify as parasites, trespassers, and collectives.

Hovanec's work has also been published in journals including Modernism/Modernity, Journal of Modern Literature, Black Camera, and Post45 Contemporaries.

Honors and Awards

2023 Outstanding Scholarship/Creative Work Award, College of Arts and Letters, University of Tampa