My current research pertains to disability, class, and the history of medicine and technology. I'm interested in how debates about formalism in literary culture, the life sciences, and clinical practice have shaded into, or served as proxies for, sites for the negotiation of what it means to be an embodied being. Part of this work involves recuperating and reconfiguring the history of medicine for disability studies. A longstanding concern in which these interests have found some traction is the science, social construction, and aesthetic representation of pain--as a non-object that thwarts literary and philosophical description, as a phenomenon that sits at the interface of mind and body, and as a knot in linear time.
Other research interests include the relationship between aesthetics and literary studies, transhistorical literary theory, and the theory of creative writing pedagogy.
I've taught literature, creative writing, and philosophy at the University of Iowa, UC Davis, and Berkeley. I was formerly the Provost's Visiting Writer at the University of Iowa, where I also worked for the Walt Whitman Archive, helping to edit and encode Whitman's late-life correspondence. In addition to calling the English Department home, I'm a member of the Critical Theory and Science and Technology Studies Designated Emphases.
Education
M.A. with Distinction, Central European University, 2022
M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop, 2019
B.A. (Highest Honors), UC Berkeley, 2015
Graduate Certificates in Political Thought (CEU), Ethics and Political Philosophy (CEU), Public Digital Humanities (University of Iowa), and Book Studies/Book Arts & Technologies (University of Iowa)
Publications
"On the Plurality of Practices." The Scholarship of Creative Writing Practice: Beyond Craft, Pedagogy, and the Academy, eds. Marshall Moore and Sam Meekings, Bloomsbury, 2024.
"The Solitary Reader and the General Strike." The Routledge Companion to Literature and Social Justice, eds. Nick T. C. Lu and Masood Ashraf Raja, 2023.
Editorial
Sub-editor, Book Reviews, International Journal of Disability and Social Justice, University of Leeds.
Editor (with Mary Ladd et al.), The Long COVID Reader, Long Hauler Publishing, 2023.
Conference presentations
"The Botanical Sublime in the Poetry of Chronic Illness." Panel: Vital Signs: Thinking and Feeling Sustenance and Survival. Modern Language Association, 2024.
"The Ethical Efficacy of Joy." Panel: Aesthetics of Accessibility: Reconsidering Accessibility/MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Modern Language Association, 2024.
"Prosthetic Speech and the Space of Appearance." Panel: Modernism and the Present. Modernist Studies Association, 2023.
"The Descriptive Life of Pain." Modernist Studies Association Seminars (Modernist Health Humanities), 2023.
Disability studies
