I am a literary scholar whose work, focused on genre, poetics, and feminist/queer theories, is primarily concerned with the politics of gender, race, and higher education in the U.S. I draw on archival research and theoretical approaches to reframe contemporary conversations, and I maintain additional research interests in science fiction, media, and disability studies.

Dissertation

Why is poetry seen as a balm in times of crisis? “Critical Exhaustion: Lyric Attachments in Contemporary Literary Studies” shows how critics have remained attached to this idea when U.S. universities have themselves been inundated with stories about crisis: economic crises from student indebtedness or a transformed labor market that alter perceptions of what education is for; disciplinary crises in the form of defunding or frayed consensus about scholarly aims that seem to leave the future of the humanities uncertain; and political crises such as “culture wars” that blame challenges in education and society on the uptake of theories of race and gender. “Critical Exhaustion” traces the influence of feminist writers who turned to poetry and experimental writing to respond to this multivalent sense of crisis since the 1990s, positioning the interface between poetics and the identity interdisciplines as a key site for understanding the cultural politics and economic transformations of U.S. research universities over the last several decades. These writers show that although crisis is a story we tell ourselves when the future seems foreclosed, it is also a feeling, and they developed fraught ways of engaging that feeling that continue to inform criticism today.

The dissertation presents four case studies in pairs of writers associated with specific fields or moments, grounding its analysis in archival correspondence, journals, and teaching materials, as well as close readings of poems, essays, memoirs, and fiction: 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 criticism 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 brought reparative claims into contact with poetics—Howe’s personal journals, Rich and Jordan’s decades of correspondence, Sedgwick’s emails to friends in the aftermath of her cancer treatment, Sharpe and Brand’s longstanding dialogue. Each chapter explores how writers turn to poetic forms of criticism in moments of fracture to reconsider how these forms bind themselves to 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 social forms of duress that foster countervailing investments in the power of writing among writers, readers, and scholars alike.

Reframing the origins and afterlives of Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading,” the controversial idea forwarded in the mid-90s that criticism might find a valuable purpose in articulating how minoritarian subjects extract “sustenance from the objects of a culture. . .whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them,” the dissertation rethinks debates about method that have shaped literary scholarship over the last several decades, plumbing the limits of investments in the aesthetics or poetics of criticism that have underwritten conversations among critics about how they ought to engage crises within and far beyond the university. Attending to writers who have inspired wide-ranging debates about the purpose of literature and literary scholarship today, “Critical Exhaustion” clarifies how ambivalent attachments to poetics have been commonplace in 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.