I teach and write on literature of the eighteenth century and Romantic era, primarily in Britain, and on the overlapping histories of literary criticism, social thought, and European colonialism. Before coming to Berkeley, I taught at Mount Tamalpais College, formerly the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison, and in the English Department at Johns Hopkins University, where I earned my Ph.D. in 2021.
I’m currently completing my first book, The Historical Poem: Literary Criticism as Historical Experience from the Enlightenment to the Present (Stanford UP, 2026). This book studies the development of modern literary criticism as it underwrites the humanistic social sciences, especially anthropological and sociological thought concerned with historical patterns of migration, settler conquest, and dispossession. The Historical Poem queries literary criticism’s relationship to the rac(ial)ist discourse of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, including self-definitions of “Anglo” peoples, and the legacies of that relationship in criticism and critical theory today.
I'm also beginning work on a second project inspired by my teaching on the practice of archaism—the deliberate use of old-fashioned or outmoded aesthetic forms. Tentatively called Archaism: Media and the Performance of History, this project extends my interests in the phenomenologies of historical feeling to a set of artists for whom the archaic disrupts normative claims of belonging—to places, communities, and modes of thought. Ranging eras and media—from Romanticism’s "distressed genres" to twentieth-century filmmakers and queer mixed-media artists like Derek Jarman, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Caroline Bergvall—Archaism traces the poetics (and politics) of the old-fashioned.
