Daun Fields (she/they) is an instructor and doctoral candidate at University of Florida English specializing in visual rhetoric and cultural studies. Her scholarship lands in visual communication, gender studies, popular music studies, and environmental humanities. In her research, she looks at how subcultural artist-musicians create feminist movements through postmodernist visual art such as album covers, posters, clothing, and photomontage. Her book in development titled, Plastic Bag: Punk Feminist Art in England (1974-1981), focuses on the formation of punk feminism through the works of Poly Styrene (X-Ray Spex), Vivienne Westwood, and Linder Sterling (Ludus).
Their second book project, Incandescent Bodies, focuses on material and lyrical works of twentieth-century DIY musician-artists who navigated climate crisis by engaging energy and oil. Through a feminist new materialist lens, this book considers methods of repurposing plastics for wearable art, writing imagined futures in songs, and recycling vinyl to create records as practical and rhetorical ways of dealing with the horrors of climate crisis. First steps have begun with this project with an accepted chapter titled, “Punk Petrohorror,” in the upcoming edited collection Haunted by Hydrocarbons: Petrogothic and Petrohorror in the Contemporary Imagination.
Her work has appeared in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, ImageText Comics Journal, and CEA Mid-Atlantic Review.
She received her M.A. in English at the University of Florida and received her B.A. in English with Honors from Indiana University, where her work on Victorian Spiritualist mediumship in Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla was awarded the Provost’s Award for Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity.
Daun is a musician in the band Evening Standards and lives in the swamplands of Gainesville, Florida, U.S. with her partner and two dogs.
Daun Fields 