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, and science fiction.

Dissertation

“Critical Exhaustion: Lyric Attachments in Contemporary Literary Studies” draws on insights from poetics and feminist criticism to rethink debates about method and the politics of higher education that have shaped literary studies since the 1990s. Investigating attachments to lyric poetry across the stories scholars tell about disciplinary crisis and culture wars, the dissertation contends that the interface between poetics and the identity interdisciplines is a robust site for understanding the cultural politics and economic transformations of U.S. 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 universities 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 fields of gender and race studies 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 reconsider the legacies of “reparative reading” and rethink the social forms of duress that foster countervailing investments in the power of writing among writers, readers, and scholars alike.

Attending to writers who have themselves inspired wide-ranging debates about the purpose of writing in the humanities, “Critical Exhaustion” clarifies how wounded, optimistic attachments to poetics have been commonplace in contemporary literary studies and feminist criticism, unsettling recurrent narratives of poetry’s marginality and reevaluating how these narratives suffuse scholars’ struggles with some of the more dramatic political, cultural, and technological changes of the last few decades.