Biography
I am a writer, cultural critic, and PhD candidate in the English department at the University of Chicago. My dissertation project, Border Symbolisms, explores the social remediation of figurative schema from occultist, esoteric, and paranormal milieux in late modernist culture. My epistemological wager is that there is an oblique but tangible form of critical inter-illumination between occultist social practices and forms of hermeneutic production, and neglected figures and groups whose exclusion from canonicity or popular memory constitute a corresponding cultural occultation. I draw from critical methodologies including cultural history, Marxism, biopolitics, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, and post/anticolonial theory, to contextualize the political and aesthetic stakes of this relation.
From 2022-2024, I co-coordinated the 20th & 21st Century Cultures workshop.