Specialties:
Biography:
My dissertation considers discourses of obviousness in literature and literary criticism alongside the development of the non-obviousness requirement in US patent law. I examine the parallels between law's assertion of the unique capacity of non-obvious ideas to serve as intellectual property and criticism's valorization of subtlety, difficulty, and ambiguity as stylistic qualities that mark genuinely distinctive authorship. Some of my other academic interests include film and new media, psychoanalysis, trans studies, Marxism, aesthetics, and ordinary language philosophy.
Beyond the English department, I am a member of the editorial board of Qui Parle, Berkeley's graduate student-run journal of critical humanities and social sciences, a student in the Program in Critical Theory, and a coordinator for the Townsend Center's Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. More recently, I received a fellowship from Berkeley's Center for the Study of Law and Society for research related to my dissertation.
In addition to my academic work, I am a poet. My first book of poems, In Lieu of Solutions, was the recipient of the Other Futures Award, and my second book, This Reasonable Habit, written with Rainer Diana Hamilton, was published in 2026.
Academic:
- "An Anatomy of Obviousness." Critical Inquiry (forthcoming 2026).
- "Facing Aboutness in Trans Poetry." Chicago Review (forthcoming 2026).
- "Trans Antinomies." Qui Parle (2025).
- "Uses of Obviousness in Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies." Post45 (2024)
Poetry:
- This Reasonable Habit (full-length volume, written with Rainer Diana Hamilton). Spunk Editions (2026).
- In Lieu of Solutions (full-length volume). Futurepoem (2023).
- "Interview with Rainer Diana Hamilton." BOMB (2023).
- "Interview with Wendy Lotterman." Futurefeed (2023).
Role:
