I am a literary studies scholar focused on 20th- and 21st-century literature and culture, with expertise in Anglo-American modernism. My work brings literary and intellectual histories together with critical theory, seeking new ways to understand the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the modern world. I am also very fond of writers like Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, Roberto Bolaño, and Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others, and would love to talk any time with students about literature or film.
Recently, my teaching and scholarship has been a more localized effort to politically and historically situate the proliferation of figures of disability within modernism, as well as interrogate the role and stakes of able-bodied novelists and readers seeking to critically engage
literary disability studies “from the outside.” This inquiry is the focus on my current book project, tentatively entitled “Disabling Modernism: Literature, History, Embodiment.” I am also growing increasingly interested in understanding and theorizing the recent “speculative turn” in contemporary literature as an emergent, vital genre of hybridity.
I received my PhD in English from the University of Oregon, have taught courses in literature, critical theory, writing, and humanities research methods, and I had the pleasure of working on the Cambridge History of American Modernism. My work can be found in the journals Modernism/modernity, Disability Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies, and Studies in the Novel, among others.
I am very excited to be with the Honors College, where I will be teaching seminars and themed humanities methods courses on “Being and Belonging in the Modern Woolfian Cityscape,” “Disability and Experimental Form in American Literary Modernism,” and “Theorizing the Speculative Turn in Contemporary Literature,” as well as Honors Thesis sections. Please drop by my office or email me any time to say hello and chat more!