I am a PhD candidate in English at UC Berkeley, where I also serve as Program Associate for the Townsend Center for the Humanities and Assistant Editor for the journal Critical Times.
Most generally, my research addresses the psychic and social costs of making sexuality into a basis for solidaristic political action. In my dissertation, Alone Song: Anticollectivism, AIDS, and the Edge of Solidarity, I take up this question by turning to an archive of self-destructive poets, bitter literary critics, outed public intellectuals, and other cultural figures who felt themselves at odds with the collectivism of AIDS activist movements. In doing so, I offer a version of AIDS history that makes central the limit cases of queer theory’s normative solidarity with figures of its past.
In addition to queer theory and HIV/AIDS history -- the subjects of my dissertation -- my research interests include lyric theory, Wilde, Northern Irish poetry, and mysticism.
