Let's start with your research. What kinds of questions brought you to graduate school, and how has your thinking evolved since?
Questions about the relationship between literature (especially poetry) and the environment first brought me to Berkeley. This quickly turned into questions about mind and language for me because you don’t have poetry without language or mind, and, as has become increasingly clear to me, you don’t have those without sharing a world with other people. So from the beginning it’s been about coming to grips with how all of this hangs together and what kind of light that might shed on what poets are doing when they shape language from within our shared world. I’ve always been fascinated by the historical interaction between poetry and philosophy, how American poets have responded—sometimes explicitly, often indirectly—to philosophical questions about how minds know and inhabit a world.
So my dissertation tries to trace postcognitivist tendencies in American poetry and poetics from Wallace Stevens through John Ashbery to contemporary ecopoetry. I’m particularly interested in points of contact with analytic philosophy: the movement away from foundationalist pictures in which knowledge must rest on some privileged, immediate relation to experience, and toward externalist accounts in which thought and meaning are socially and environmentally constituted. I’m asking how poets work through comparable problems in their own terms: How does Stevens rethink the relation between imagination and reality without appealing either to unmediated Nature or to a mind sealed off from the world? What forms of environmental answerability emerge when Ashbery unsettles ordinary habits of interpretation? How might Jorie Graham imagine attention adequate to ecological crisis without reducing poetry either to scientific description or to a paean to an ineffable Nature?
Do you find your research reflected in your teaching? How do the two relate to each other?
Yes, no doubt. Since I usually think of a poem less as communicating an idea in some ornate manner than as changing the conditions under which certain ways of seeing and thinking become possible, teaching gives me a chance to experience something like that in real time. I like the challenge of finding different ways into an idea that initially seems inaccessible: What examples or thought experiments might help? How much shared ground can I point to? The job is really about modeling a habit of inquiry. You try one route, you abandon it when it isn’t working, you try approaching the issue from another angle, and you thereby do your best to show students that understanding develops through that kind of movement rather than appearing all at once.
I also really like working with students from well beyond English. Many come from engineering, biology, computer science, or economics, which forces me to make literary questions interesting and intelligible without assuming much disciplinary background. In scholarship it’s often possible to begin halfway into a conversation because so much is already taken for granted. Teaching asks you to begin much earlier. Can you find the point at which an idea first becomes thinkable? Trying to go back to that point has clarified my own thinking every bit as much as my students’. Teaching has made it clear that when you push far enough into a genuinely difficult question, disciplinary boundaries start to matter less than the quality of attention you bring to the problem.
Questions about the relationship between literature (especially poetry) and the environment first brought me to Berkeley. This quickly turned into questions about mind and language for me because you don’t have poetry without language or mind, and, as has become increasingly clear to me, you don’t have those without sharing a world with other people.
Could you tell us about how your time at Berkeley inflected, changed, or otherwise impacted your approach to literary studies? How did your research grow here? Have there been faculty members whose work has inspired your own?
I think Berkeley has never asked me to become a different kind of scholar. It has been more about giving me the freedom and mentorship to pursue the questions that genuinely interest me, even as they have expanded beyond what I had originally imagined. I owe much of that to the faculty I’ve had the privilege to work with.
Charles Altieri has had a big influence on me. There is something contagious about the enthusiasm and seriousness with which he pursues ideas. Charlie and I often find ourselves drawn to many of the same questions—about Wallace Stevens, the transition from Romanticism to Modernism, or the point at which cognition might be evaded—but we frequently disagree about the arguments needed to arrive there. Having to clarify those differences has been, and continues to be, one of the most productive parts of my own intellectual development.
Alva Noë’s work has consistently reminded me how many philosophical problems arise from simply beginning with a false dichotomy. If you begin by forgetting you have a body or by imagining that the mind somehow has to bridge a gap to the world, then an enormous amount of philosophy becomes an attempt to solve a problem of its own making.
Watching Kent Puckett think and talk about literature has made me much more attentive to the form and sequence of an argument. I keep learning from him just how many different ways sequence can be part of the thinking: in what it allows us to see at each stage, in how the different stakes of an argument emerge as it unfolds, and so on.
Eric Falci has been enormously encouraging in helping me pursue my own interests while also reminding me that every generalization about poetry is provisional, because the next poem may demand a different vocabulary. I admire that refusal to let theory become more settled than the poets and poems themselves. Whenever I find myself becoming too confident in a general account of what poetry is or does, his example reminds me to return to the poems themselves and let them reshape the terms of the conversation.
How would you describe the stage you are in the program now? How has it differed from previous ones?
This stage has felt very different from everything that came before it. The first several years of graduate school involved a constant process of adaptation: moving to Berkeley, navigating the pandemic, becoming the parent of two young children, coursework, the qualifying exam, teaching, and eventually developing a dissertation project. Just as I felt I was beginning to understand one role, it was time to take on another.
The Dissertation Completion Fellowship has been the first extended period in which I’ve had the time to settle into a single stage of graduate school. The dissertation itself demands a new and different set of skills, of course, but having the time to learn that role—and then actually inhabit it, rather than immediately moving on to something else—has been invaluable. It feels like I’ve finally had the chance to catch up with myself.
I also really like working with students from well beyond English. Many come from engineering, biology, computer science, or economics, which forces me to make literary questions interesting and intelligible without assuming much disciplinary background.
What book, either related to your field or not, would you recommend to us?
Rather than trying to name an all-time favorite, I’ll answer by mentioning a book I read recently that knocked my socks off enough to deem it worthy of recommendation: The Instruction of Imagination by Daniel Dor. It’s a fascinating account of language as a social technology that evolved for instructing one another’s imagination, asking how language enables us to make ourselves intelligible to one another despite whatever experiential gaps separate us.
