At the broadest level, my research focuses on the entanglement of literary forms and genres with the cultural politics of gender, race, and education in the U.S. since the 1970s. Much of my work is concerned with the changing political and economic dynamics of higher education and with notions of expertise and prestige, particularly as they bear on questions of method in feminist and queer cultural criticism.

My dissertation was about the status of poetry in the recent history of literary 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. Reexamining several major feminist critics through their attachments to poetry, I drew on archival work to rethink the legacy of writers such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Dionne Brand. By considering how they weathered backlash and negotiated political aspirations by recasting the kinds of knowledge, expressions of criticality, and forms of writing that count as valuable, I reframed more recent turns to poetics and experimental modes of criticism across the humanities.

I am developing the work I began in the dissertation with two projects titled The Lyric Humanities: Poetics and Criticism in Crisis and The Race for Reparative Reading. I have begun research for a third project, titled Separatist Science Fictions, about the place of speculative fiction in visions of technological futurity, identity-based enclaves, epistemic bubbles, and political exit or withdrawal.