I am a PhD candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature, and I am particularly interested in American pragmatism, cognitive literary studies, and science studies.
My dissertation, "Pragmatic Ambiguities: Aphoristic Thinking in the American Nineteenth Century," discusses a particular stream of thought among nineteenth-century nonfiction authors, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who use aphorism to engage readers in a never-ending process of interpretation. This project is also multinational in scope, covering German authors, like Friedrich Nietzsche, and Asian religion. For more information on my current research projects, click here. |
I am currently on a Fulbright research grant in Germany. I am being hosted by the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, part of Freie Universität Berlin.
View my current CV here.
View my current CV here.
Upcoming Events
4-5 March 2021, Bergen, Norway (virtual due to COVID-19): I will present the paper "Thoreau's Radicle Empiricism: Arboreal Encounters and the Posthuman Forest" at the annual conference for the European Society for Literature, Science & the Arts.
7-11 April 2021, virtual: I will present the paper "Thoreau's Arboreal Encounters: A Transatlantic Re-Vision" in a panel sponsored by the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) at the British Association for American Studies conference, which will be wholly online due to COVID-19.
September 2021, Granada, Spain (postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19): I will present the paper "Thinking Like a Tree: Human Cognition and Speculative Forest Thinking" at the Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment, entitled Transcreations: Creaturely Encounters as Cultural Artefacts.
7-11 April 2021, virtual: I will present the paper "Thoreau's Arboreal Encounters: A Transatlantic Re-Vision" in a panel sponsored by the British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (BrANCA) at the British Association for American Studies conference, which will be wholly online due to COVID-19.
September 2021, Granada, Spain (postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19): I will present the paper "Thinking Like a Tree: Human Cognition and Speculative Forest Thinking" at the Biennial Conference of the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment, entitled Transcreations: Creaturely Encounters as Cultural Artefacts.