CV

Academic Employment

Washington & Lee University

Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program

Education

PhD, Comparative Literature, UCI (2022)

MA, Comparative Literature, UCI (2016)

Post-Baccalaureate, Classics, UCLA (2013)

BA, Liberal Arts, Sarah Lawrence College (2011)

My book manuscript, “The Poetry of Origins: the Ode, Personhood, and the Rise of the Lyric,” reevaluates the ode’s influence on the study of lyric poetry. Whereas literary criticism since the eighteenth century has treated the ode as a fundamentally ancient genre, I argue that its development is essentially modern. Inseparable from the histories of colonization and race that were integral to the formation of the modern world, the ode took shape in the crosscurrents of Atlantic exchange. I contend that the ode has been so difficult to define because it subsumed other poetic forms, such as the Pindaric and progress poem, into a generalized idea of the lyric, defined by commonplaces such as personification and apostrophe. These tropes helped to form complex allegories of colonial authority that relied upon a racialized sense of literary futurity.

Research Interests

• British and transatlantic literature of the long eighteenth century; formations of race and gender in the early Atlantic world; comparative poetics; the history of literary theory & criticism.

Peer-reviewed Articles

• “Race, Fancy, and the Lyric’s ‘Soaring Fortunes’” [under revision].

• “Consider the Source: Robert Wedderburn’s Radical Gospel” [commissioned; under revision].

• “Salvaging Enlightenment” [commissioned; revision submitted].

• “‘Oblivions Sable Shore’: Phillis Wheatley Peters at the Limits of Lyric History,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 64, No. 3-4 (Fall-Winter, 2023): 303-326.

• “‘How the World Really Ends’: Adorno on Working through Catastrophes to Come,” Cultural Critique 109 (Fall, 2020): 112-138.

Book Chapters

• “The Middle Passage,” Phillis Wheatley Peters in Context [accepted].

Book Reviews and Criticism

• Review, Common Measures: Romanticism and the Groundlessness of Community by Joseph Albernaz, Comparative Literature Studies [accepted].

• Review, The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation by Lenora Hanson, Studies in Romanticism (Winter, 2023): 541–552.

• “Global Poetics: Reactive and Relational,” The Georgia Review 75, no. 4 (Winter, 2021), 1061-77.

• “On Jay Wright’s The Prime Anniversary,” The Georgia Review 74, no. 2 (Summer, 2020), 55-9.

Fellowships and Awards (selected)

• Lenfest Grant for Summer Research, WLU, 2023;24.

• Mellon-Council for European Studies Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Columbia University, 2021-22.

• Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Humanities Scholarship, UCI, Summer, 2020.

• Dorothy and Donald Strauss Dissertation & Thesis Fellowship, UCI, Winter and Spring quarters, 2020.

• Predoctoral Fellowship, UCLA Center for 17th- & 18th-Century Studies, William A. Clark Memorial Library, October, 2019. 

• Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellowship, The Huntington Library, August and September, 2019. 

• Regents’ Fellowship, University of California, 2013-2014.

Presentations and panels

• “Spectator 215 and Colonial Education,” “Round Table: Teaching Race and Empire,” Race and Empire Caucus, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, online, 2025. 

• “Settler Sentimentalism in the Poetry of Timothy Dwight,” “Land as Method,”American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Early Americanist Caucus, online, 2025.

• “Lyric Comparison,” “Genre and Normitivity,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, 2024.

• “Temporal Revolutions in British Abolitionism,” “Revisiting Capitalism and Slavery in the Early Atlantic World,” Race and Empire Caucus, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Toronto, 2024.

• “Fragments of Colonial Time in Equiano, Cowper, and Wedderburn,” East-Central American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, College of William & Mary, 2023.

• “Genres of the Atlantic,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, St. Louis, 2023 [organizer].

• “Lyric Environments at the Dawn of Liberalism,”Twenty-Eighth International Conference of Europeanists, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, 2022 [invited].  

• “New Formalisms and the Form of the New,” book launch, Catherine Malabou, Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion, Tyler Williams (ed.), 2022 [invited]. 

• “Fancy’s Flowing Sea: Classicism, Primitivism, and the Atlantic Ode,” “Historical Poetics Now” for the panel “Common Forms of Empire,” UT Austin, 2019. 

• “Hölderlin: Poetics Under Pressure,” American Comparative Literature Association, for the panel “Prosthetic Immortalities: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Logic of Survival,” UCLA, 2018.

• “How the World Really Ends: Adorno on the Anthropocene,” “New Materialisms and Economies of Excess,” Emory, 2016.

• “The Powers of Ekstasis,” “Early Cultures Conference: Feeling History,” UCI, 2016.

Teaching Experience and Syllabi

• Professor, “Gothic Geographies” WLU, 2025.

• Professor, “Genres of the Atlantic,” WLU, 2024.

• Professor, “Atlantic Worlds, Atlantic Violence,” WLU, 2023.

• Professor, “Metaphysical Poetics,” WLU, 2023.

• Professor, “Civil War,” WLU, 2022-3.

• Writing Consultant, Graduate & Postdoctoral Scholar Resource Center, UCI, 2020-2021. 

• Teaching Associate, Comparative Literature, CL10, "The End: Fear, Fiction, and the Future," Summer Session, UCI 2020.

• Instructor, Rhetoric and Composition, Department of English, UCI 2016-2019.

• Co-author of the syllabus for the “Space, Projection, Expression, Immanence” and “Time and the Negative” reading seminars with Carlos Colmenares Gil and Catherine Malabou, Spring 2018 and ‘19.  

• Co-author of  the syllabus for the Inter-UC EcoMaterialisms Collective reading group, "Scales of Matter(ing)," 2015-2016.

• Tutor, Latin, Department of Classics, UCI, 2015-2016.

• TA, Roman History and Greek Mythology, Department of Classics, UCI, 2014-16.

Languages

• Latin (advanced), Ancient Greek (intermediate), German (intermediate), Spanish (beginning), French (reading).