Holly Brown‘s PhD project demonstrates how a genealogy of statelessness can be used as a framework to consider previously unexplored links between pre- and post-9/11 American literature. Analysing the way in which literature has responded to the suspension of civil rights by the American government in the post-9/11 era, her research seeks to expose the enduring significance of “bare life” within American culture. She connects the wandering and negated male protagonist of the 9/11 canon, most famously articulated through the protagonists in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, to earlier representations of figures who have been stripped of their political rights in order to explore a longer history of the interrogation of democratic ideals in the American context.