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I am a PhD candidate in English & American literature at Washington University in St. Louis (expected to defend in May 2023). I specialize in nineteenth-century American literature, focusing on the nonfiction writing from the American Transcendentalists and Pragmatists. My research focuses on writers who appear in this century on the periphery of various emerging disciplines, especially the empirical life and psychological sciences. These writers, I argue, use features of the aphorism, like incompleteness, suggestiveness, and the encouragement of constant readerly engagement and interpretation—features typically seen as poetic—in their unique prose.
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In my dissertation, Pragmatic Ambiguities: Aphoristic Thinking in the American Nineteenth Century, I identify and examine 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 an unending process of interpretation. In defining the aphorism, I point to the German tradition of Aphorismus (as distinct from Sentenz: the “sentences” or maxims, especially of the French moralists) to identify in the form an inherent evasiveness and ambiguity. Along the way, I draw on the extensive history of the aphorism—from the medical writings of Hippocrates to the scientific hypotheses of Francis Bacon—to situate the form among science studies, affect theory, and a wide range of transnational theories of the aphorism.
WashU Homepage
WashU Homepage
Upcoming Events
November 18, 2022, St. Louis, MO: I will present the paper “The Centrifugal Aphorism: Tracing a Transatlantic Form in the Nineteenth Century” at the Department of English Graduate Student Colloquium at Washington University in St. Louis. Accessible copies of the talk are available here.
January 5–8, 2023, San Francisco, CA: I will present the paper “Du Bois in Berlin, Du Bois in Atlanta: The Affect of Exile in The Souls of Black Folk” at the Modern Language Association. This is part of a panel hosted by the Margaret Fuller Society.
January 5–8, 2023, San Francisco, CA: I will present the paper “Du Bois in Berlin, Du Bois in Atlanta: The Affect of Exile in The Souls of Black Folk” at the Modern Language Association. This is part of a panel hosted by the Margaret Fuller Society.