RESEARCH

Jelly is a substance we use to imagine ways of living at scales beyond the human: bounded but undifferentiated, moving but not quite alive, with a texture uncannily akin to our own flesh. My current research analyzes how jelly has wiggled from the kitchen into the library and laboratory, where thinkers have used it to conceptualize things too big to grasp (like empire and capitalism), things too good to be true (like technology and magic), and things too in-between to classify (like primordial forms of life).

Jelly blurs the line between live and inert. It is a bounded body, but an undifferentiated mass; it is inactive, but moves. If you press it, it gives way—then bounces back. To think with jelly, as a durable body that moves like our own flesh or fat, is to think about bodies and perception, and to ask how we consider a body to be alive.

I am tracing the modern history of jelly from the late 18th through the 21st century, using cookbooks and gelatin ephemera to demonstrate how cooks’ thinking has been absorbed into intellectual history, shaping our concepts of embodiment, animacy, and abstraction. Looking at living jelly in speculative fiction, I analyze how this social history feeds our imagination about future life as more-than-human.