Biography
I received my Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2018, and I’ve been working as a preceptor at MAPH since 2014. Before that, I earned a B.A. in philosophy and history from the University of California, Berkeley. My research and teaching interests these days center on the many ways that organic life, technology, and other kinds of nonhuman matter shape and influence human social forms and relations of power. On the one hand, I’m interested in the natural / “natural” life of the human body; I teach, research, and think about social formations and sites of struggle and domination around both biological reproduction and sexuality—especially for women and for those people historically-marked as sexually “deviant” in one way or another. On the other hand, I’m interested in unimaginably vast and unthinkably tiny natural processes and types of matter—particularly evolution and micro-matter (bacteria, viruses, pollen, and the like). I am especially interested in how these have been taken up in the social sciences and by cultural producers, alike; and in the way they have been intercepted by the state, by public health policy or other biopolitical institutions that regulate and control human and nonhuman populations.
Most broadly, my interests, research, and teaching live in gender and sexuality studies, queer and feminist theory, animal / nonhuman studies and the environmental humanities, science and technology studies, and the history of the social and biological sciences. I also always want to read and learn more about science fiction, historical and evolutionary origin stories, radical politics, so-called proletarian literature, and the 1930s “red decade.” I am primarily an Americanist literary and cultural studies scholar, and my thinking most often centers on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, though I’m moving further into the present all the time.
I am a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.