I am a literary scholar who brings insights from poetics, feminist theories, and critical university studies to bear on debates about method in literary studies and the identity-based interdisciplines, such as gender studies and critical race studies. My work draws on archival research and theoretical approaches to reframe contemporary conversations about the politics of knowledge in the humanities. I maintain additional research interests in disability studies, psychoanalysis, science fiction, and the sociology of literature.

Dissertation

“Critical Exhaustion: Lyric Attachments in Contemporary Literary Studies,” investigates the entanglement of lyric poetry in debates about the aims of U.S. literary studies and feminist criticism from the 1970s to the present. Tracking these “lyric attachments” across the stories scholars tell about disciplinary crisis and culture wars on higher education, the dissertation contends that the critical interface between poetics and the identity interdisciplines is a robust site for understanding the cultural politics and economic transformations of research universities over the last several decades. Reframing the origins and afterlives of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of “reparative reading” in this context, the dissertation reconsiders how redemptive investments in the aesthetic value and forms of criticism itself have underwritten contentious conversations among literary and cultural critics about how their methods ought to engage their shifting status within U.S. higher education or a broader “crisis of the humanities.”

Grounding its analysis in studies of archival correspondence, journals, and teaching materials, as well as close readings of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction, the dissertation presents four case studies in pairs of writers more often discussed in the context of separate fields or moments: Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein (Language writing), Adrienne Rich and June Jordan (feminist criticism), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rafael Campo (queer studies), and Christina Sharpe and Dionne Brand (Black feminist theory). Reassessing the creative approaches to critical practice these writers developed across periods of upheaval, expansion, and backlash against the identity fields with which they have been affiliated, the chapters unearth intimate, institutional histories that have brought reparative hermeneutic claims into contact with poetics. Each chapter explores how writers turn to poetic forms of criticism or study in moments of fracture and fatigue to reconsider how these forms bind themselves to specific sites of social injury, restitution for racialized and gendered exclusions, and wider political struggles around the terms of intellectual legitimacy, merit, expertise, and authority. Forgoing the impulse to valorize or dismiss how this writing defies convention, the dissertation schematizes its crisis rhetoric to rethink the legacies of “reparative reading” and reframe the social forms of duress that foster countervailing investments in the power of writing among writers, readers, and scholars alike.

“Critical Exhaustion” clarifies how optimistic attachments to poetics have been commonplace in contemporary literary studies and feminist criticism, unsettling recurrent narratives of poetry’s marginality and explaining how these narratives reflect scholars’ struggles with some of the more dramatic political, cultural, and technological changes of the last few decades. By attending to writers enmeshed in the impasses of contemporary critical culture that have themselves inspired wide cathexes and unlikely solidarities, the dissertation affirms that the ambivalence humanistic scholars may have about their knowledge, its forms, and its purpose in rapidly shifting institutional and economic landscapes, sometimes rationalized as a reason for their diminishment, is in fact a vital aspect of the abiding, non-instrumental value of the humanities which persists in spite of ongoing efforts to obviate it.