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Olivia Badoi, Ph.D.


Department of English

Education

Ph.D. in English, Fordham University
M.A. in English Language and Literature (with honors), University of Wroclaw, Poland
B.A. in American Studies, University of Bucharest, Romania

Practice Areas

  • Visual and Literary Modernism
  • Graphic Narrative Studies
  • Ecocriticism

Research Interests

Dr. Badoi specializes in visual modernism, graphic narrative studies, and ecocriticism. Her book, Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), offers an ecocritical examination of the woodcut novel, a type of wordless book that was widely popular in both Europe and the United States throughout the first half of the twentieth century. The book proposes an original framework of 'arboreal modernism' to illuminate how artists used nonhuman networks such as trees and forests as a model for interconnectivity and a corrective for their own broken social system. Crafted out of wood, with pages densely populated with trees, the woodcut book embodies a living relation between nature and culture.

Publications and Media Placements

Book

Badoi, Olivia. Arboreal Modernism and the Woodcut Book. Palgrave Macmillan, Dec. 2025.
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-032-10816-6

Articles

Badoi, Olivia. "The Many Eyes of Desire: A First-Time English Translation of Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu's Short Story Closeness (1920) from the Original Romanian," Feminist Modernist Studies (Taylor & Francis), Oct. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/24692921.2022.2120726

Badoi, Olivia. "A Feeling for Wood Itself: Lynd Ward's Arboreal Modernism," Modernism/Modernity (Johns Hopkins University Press), vol. 6, no. 2, July 2021. https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0207

Badoi, Olivia. "Writer's (Wood)block," Modernism/Modernity: Print Plus, 2.1, Sept. 2017.

Creative and Public Writing

Badoi, Olivia. "Beyond Free Willy: Orcas, Resistance, and the Spirit of the Sea," Haunted Shores (Sept. 2023).

Badoi, Olivia. "Fool's Gold," Sky Island Journal, issue 21, July 2022.

Selected Conferences and Presentations

"Romanian Modernism and the Fungal Metaphor," Fermentation, Saint Louis University-Madrid (2025).

"Feasting on the Unthinkable: Cannibalism in Bones and All and The Vegetarian," Critical Approaches to Food and Drinks in Literature, University of Bucharest, Romania (2023).

"From Lost Giraffes to Ghost Foxes: Narratives of Authenticity and the Liminality of Animal Representation in Screen Media," The Factual Animal, University of Valencia (2023).

"Human and Non-Human Language in Guillermo del Toro's The Murmuring,” Adaptation, Saint Louis University-Madrid (2023).

"The Occult in American Modernism," Eco-anxiety and Spirituality in Literature, Universite Catholique Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium (2023).

"Gen Z and the Archetype of the Vampire," Discourses of Fictional (Digital) TV Series, University of Valencia (2022).

"Palimpsestic Time in Eric Drooker's Flood!" Landscape, Narrative, and Deep Time, Saint Louis University-Madrid (2022).

"The Woodcut Novel and the Politics of Form," Modern Language Association Conference, New York City (2018).

"Modernism and Materiality in the Woodcut Novels of Lynd Ward and Frans Masereel," Modernist Studies Association Conference, Amsterdam (2017).

"Wordless Witness: Emotion as Communication in Wordless Narratives," Modern Language Association Conference, Philadelphia (2017).