TAMIU Professor Selected for Prestigious Fellowship at Huntington Library This Summer

A Texas A&M International University (TAMIU) faculty member will have the rare privilege of conducting research on famed author Jack London this summer as part of a Fellowship at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

Dr. Nathaniel R. Racine, TAMIU assistant professor of English, was selected for the Fellowship.

Dr. Racine said London’s writing drew inspiration from travel and so geography figures prominently in his research.

“London is perhaps most well-known for his novels The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906).  His writings drew inspiration from all of the many places he traveled—whether sailing across the Pacific to Oceania and Japan, or traversing the North American continent from Alaska and the Yukon Territory, through the Pacific Northwest and California, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. That geographical component of London’s writings is the primary focus of this research project, which studies London’s short fiction ranging across his early and late career,” Dr. Racine said.

“By accounting for both the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of London’s writings and biography, readers can better understand the international dynamics at play in London’s larger body of work, demonstrating that he is far more than a regional writer of ‘local color’ stories and, instead, an author well-suited in for inclusion within the ongoing ‘hemispheric turn’ in U.S. literary study, which seeks to understand the cultural and intellectual exchanges among Canada, Mexico, and the U.S.,” he added.

While this project stems from Racine’s other work focusing on the place of Mexico in U.S. literature, his work at Huntington will directly contribute to his work as one of the volume editors working to compile The Complete Works of Jack London, to be published by Oxford University Press.

That series will be the first complete set of Jack London’s works compiled in a uniform, scholarly edition. Consisting of 30 volumes, Racine is the editor of volume 23, which will gather London’s uncollected stories and poetry alongside London’s posthumously published collection, Dutch Courage and Other Stories (1922). 

Racine holds his Ph.D. from Temple University and joined TAMIU’s faculty in 2019. 

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