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I am a PhD candidate in American literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature, especially nonfiction writing from the American Transcendentalist and Pragmatist traditions. My research focuses on writers who appear in this century on the periphery of different and emerging disciplines, such as the empirical life sciences—these writers, I argue, use the aphoristic features like incompleteness, suggestiveness, and the necessity of constant interpretation—features typically seen as poetic—in their unique nonfiction prose.
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In my dissertation, "Pragmatic Ambiguities: Aphoristic Thinking in the American Nineteenth Century," I discuss this stream of aphoristic thought among an interconnected group of writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois. All of these writers use the aphorism to engage readers in a never-ending process of interpretation. In defining the aphorism, I point to Friedrich Nietzsche (who, despite not being American, was a deep reader of Emerson's), whose evolving conception of Aphorismus models the type of aphoristic writing I identify in my chosen authors. Along the way, I turn to science studies, affect theory, and a range of transnational theories of the aphorism, including Asian religious texts. For more information on my current research projects, click here.
I am currently on a Fulbright Research Fellowship 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.
WashU Homepage | JFK Institute Homepage
I am currently on a Fulbright Research Fellowship 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.
WashU Homepage | JFK Institute Homepage
Upcoming Events
March 31–April 2, 2022, Coral Gables, FL: I will present the paper "'A Penumbra of Vagueness': W. E. B. Du Bois's Aphoristic Reconstructions in The Souls of Black Folk" at C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. This is part of my organized panel, "W. E. B. Du Bois's Reconstruction of Language."
Fall 2022, 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.
Fall 2022, 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.