Profile

Julia Laurel Mueller is an essayist and scholar of poetry and poetics, natural history, film, observation and attention. She earned a PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2021 with a dissertation entitled, "The Intelligence of Attention." She also holds a BA in English and French from the Clark Honors College, University of Oregon, and an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her scholarship focuses on the poetics of observation and attention—how perception of the natural world is translated into literary form. Scholarship, criticism and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Bright Wall/Dark Room, ELH, The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, Literary Matters, Little White Lies and Menagerie. She joined the Basic Program in Fall 2023.