Biography
I earned my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2025 and hold a BA in English from Kenyon College. I teach courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, as well as in the Media Aesthetics sequence of the Humanities Core.
My research focuses on the intersecting histories of the British novel, private philanthropy, and public welfare during eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In my book project, Charity Plots: The Novel in the Age of Benevolence, 1720-1840, I argue that the British realist novel developed as a cultural form to critique anxieties that receiving charity would interrupt an individual’s pursuit of independence by making them addicted to aid. In the face of these anxieties, novelists embrace dependence on the kindness of others as a necessary and even desirable aspect of social life.
I am also at work on a second project, Captive Works: Unfree Labor and the Epistemology of Free Grace, which extends my thinking about states of dependence by examining the relationship between antislavery writing and religious experience from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Work from this project has appeared Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Publications
“‘Good works he had none’: Methodism and Antislavery in The Interesting Narrative” Eighteenth-Century Studies 59, no. 3 (2026) Pp. 381-97.
