My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, novel theory, literature and philosophy, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, and cultural studies.
My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel ("Thinking Literature" series, University of Chicago Press, 2020) turns to some experiments of modernist form - by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, most centrally, Virginia Woolf - in order to reinvigorate our thinking about the ubiquitous but still under-theorized category of novelistic description. I have also written on topics including the role of atmospheres in everyday life, Roland Barthes's travels in China, and the role of the detail in fictions that withhold some piece of social information, such as a character's gender or race.
My editorial work includes a co-edited cluster on "setting" for Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and a new annotated edition of Woolf's A Room of One’s Own for the Norton Library, which appeared in 2026.
I am currently at work on a book project, "On Being a Type," that examines what it means to understand individuals – real and fictional – as representative of larger classes of persons.
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature, Princeton University
B.A., Philosophy, University of Toronto.
