I am a scholar of modern and contemporary American literature, media, and poetics. My research examines how literary criticism and genre have shaped debates about gender, race, and higher education in the U.S. since the 1970s. I am especially interested in the histories of feminist and queer criticism.
My dissertation was about the status of poetry in the recent history of minoritarian cultural criticism: as the paradigm for a broader crisis in literary studies, as a site of contestation in culture wars, as a vehicle for registering, refusing, or adjusting to institutional conditions increasingly hostile to humanistic expertise. Chapters addressed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s papers and the poetics of her queer theory; the feminist poets Adrienne Rich and June Jordan and reassessments of their relationship during global campus protests in 2024; and Christina Sharpe’s black feminist criticism in the context of her collaborations with Dionne Brand.
I am developing the work I began in the dissertation with two projects titled Lyric Attachments: Minoritarian Poetics and Criticism in Crisis and The Race for Reparative Reading. I have begun research for a third project, Separatist Science Fictions, about speculative fiction, genre communities, epistemic bubbles, technological futurity, and the politics of exit or withdrawal.
Publications
“Salve, Balm, Map, Trace: Reading Sharpe and Brand Writing,” article under review.
“Reparative Reading’s Dialogue: In the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers,” article under review.
“The Last Graduate Students?” Public Books, forthcoming.
Review of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll, Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, forthcoming.
Review of The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, Journal of Modern Literature 48.2, 2025: 168–172.
“Writing in the Age of Disability,” Feminist Studies 50.2, 2024: 262–280.