My research explores the relationship between global modernisms, dialectical thought, and critical social theory. My dissertation, The Surplus Standpoint: Unemployment and the Crisis of Dialectical Representation, argues that systemic unemployment since the nineteenth century has undermined available modes of social self-representation, producing crises not only in political economy but in aesthetic and philosophical representations of society more broadly. Working across literary and visual modernisms—from Alice Neel’s portraiture to the novels of Claude McKay, William Faulkner, and Édouard Glissant—I show how this representational crisis of unemployment manifests as a constitutive formal dilemma in “weak,” late, and peripheral modernisms. The project thus offers a new way of articulating the genealogy of dialectical thought and modern representation from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as well as a new framework whereby a number of contemporary academic discourses and disciplines—Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, philosophy and sociology, art history and narrative theory—might be brought into renewed dialogue.
I hold a BA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. At Berkeley, I am supported by a Mellon-Berkeley Fellowship, and I am completing a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.
Selected Publications:
“The Surplus Epic: Representing Postplantation Unemployment in Glissant and Faulkner.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. [Forthcoming]
“Clash of Empires and the Logistics Counterrevolution: A Conversation with Ho-Fung Hung and Charmaine Chua.” Marxist Institute for Research.
“The Concept of the Lumpenproletariat: Toward a Categorial Derivation and Disaggregation.” Kontradikce / Contradictions. [Forthcoming]
“The Necessary Fetish.” Review of Beverly Best’s The Automatic Fetish in Philosophy, Politics and Critique. [Forthcoming]
“Continuities of Racial Fascism: Louis Till and Black Marxism in the Pisan Cantos.” Journal of Foreign Language and Cultures, 2021.
“Joyce Saint James: Perpetual Pilgrimage in Ulysses.” Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism, 2019.
Selected Presentations & Lectures:
“Bonapartism en face.” Paper presented at Institute for Languages and Cultures, 2025.
“Futile Singulars: Alice Neel’s Monadology of Wageless Life.” Lecture delivered for Berkeley-Stanford Lecture Series, Stanford University, with respondent Prof. Blakey Vermeule, 2025.
“‘The Housekeeping of Spirit’: The Crisis of Carework in the Dialectical Tradition.” Paper presented at “Hegel and World Literature,” ACLA, 2025.
“Jameson Contra Sociology.” Paper presented at “Analytics of Value,” UC Santa Cruz, 2025.
“The Problem Romance of Black Marxism.” Paper presented at Institute for Languages and Cultures, 2024.
“Negative Dialectics and Lumpenization.” Paper presented at “The Future of the Lumpenproletariat," UC Santa Barbara, 2024.
“Choosing a Fetish with Banjo.” Paper presented at “The Rhetoric of Value,” ACLA, 2024.
"Black Power’s Free Improvisation and its Afterimage in Tongo Eisen-Martin." Paper presented at "Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir," ACLA, 2023.
“Continuities of Racial Fascism: ‘The Pisan Cantos’ as Elegy for Louis Till.” Paper presented at “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,” cosponsored by Wayne State University, Hunan Normal University, and Statement magazine, 2021.
“Finnegans Wake 24/7: Dreams and the Self-Negativity of Labor.” Paper presented at Laboratoire Junior OVALE at Sorbonne Université, 2020.
