My dissertation, “‘Broken Time’: Serial Temporality in Nineteenth-Century Radical Print,” examines how radical writers and publishers in the nineteenth century mobilized serial publication formats to experiment with non-linear temporalities and challenge conceptualizations of progressive or linear time. While existing scholarship often assumes an inherent connection between seriality and capitalist modes of production/consumption, my research reveals how radical writers deliberately used serial formats to interrupt and critique these very systems. Through careful analysis of labor and black radical periodicals, I demonstrate how the formal “gaps” between serial installments created spaces for imagining alternative political and economic possibilities. 

This project makes several interventions in the fields of periodical studies and nineteenth-century American literature. First, it challenges the dominant theoretical framework, derived from Jean-Paul Sartre, which views seriality as inherently aligned with the productive, distributive, and consumptive aims of capital. In short, these arguments suggest that radical writers unwittingly participated in the formal mechanisms of the very structures they aimed to undo. Instead, I show how radical writers strategically employed serial forms to disrupt linear temporality and modes of acquisitive desire. Second, my research recovers an understudied archive of radical serial publications, moving beyond the traditional focus on British Victorian serials to examine American and Caribbean radical print networks. Finally, by forwarding a theoretical framework centered on the “serial gap,” (a concept developed in the work of Ryan Engley) my work illuminates how the very structure of serial publication could advance anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial political projects.