Renée Brown’s research focuses on the textual genre of ethnography, taken in its broadest sense as a description of culture. Through a historical and literary analysis of ethnographic writing, Renée engages questions related to the process of translating experience into knowledge through writing. In particular, she is interested in the practices of observation, dialogue, and note-taking which make possible this translation. Her current project deals with the archive of an unpublished New York City guidebook produced in 1939, under the auspices of the New Deal’s Federal Writer’s Project. Her thesis examines this guidebook’s ethnographic enterprise in relation to concurrent theoretical and literary movements.
