معرفی
Sylvie Boulette serves as a Writing and Research Advisor and Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where she collaborates with faculty colleagues and supports undergraduate thesis writers through research strategy development and virtual writing communities.
She earned her BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 before completing her PhD at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation Appetite for Ecstasy: Chronic Dispossession and Biochemical Governance in America, 1870-1920 established her scholarly focus on the intersections of biochemical governance, race, and settler capitalism.
Her research program critically examines how state administration of psychotropic substances reinforced racialized and gendered hierarchies through concepts of irritability, delirium, and euphoria. Current projects extend her analysis of biochemical routes of state power into contemporary contexts while maintaining deep engagement with 19th-century American literary archives.
Recent publications demonstrate consistent output in high-impact venues like American Quarterly, with work spanning opium regulation in Chinatown, peyote ceremonies as indigenous resistance, and cocaine's racialized criminalization. These studies reveal patterns in how drug policies constructed racial subjectivities under American capitalism.
As an educator, she has taught specialized courses on intoxication and 19th-century appetite narratives while providing foundational writing support across the curriculum. Her advising philosophy emphasizes ethical engagement with marginalized histories and collaborative knowledge production within undergraduate research clusters.
