Biography
I received my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2023 and hold an M.A. in Psychology from NYU. Broadly, my research examines the interactivity of literary form and embodiment in history, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, disability, and racialization across the 19th and 20th centuries. I teach in English and the Media Aesthetics Core.
I am at work on two book projects:
Insignificant Others: Literary Experiments in Early Asexuality casts new light on the “invention of sexuality,” excavating the central role played by asexuality in the crystallization of the homo-/heterosexual binary, along with the broader compulsorization of sexuality across this period. The proliferation of new clinical types (e.g. “desexualized hermaphrodites,” “unsexed epicene automatons,” “nature’s nuns,” “sexual anesthesia”) fanned period anxieties about declining rates of fertility and rising rates of celibacy. By excavating these once-prominent asexual “types,” I reveal the period’s heretofore forgotten politics of asexuality, which was central to the rise of eugenics, American consumer culture, and racial uplift projects.
A second book project, Anaesthetic Aesthetics: Writing the Cancerous Self, emerges out of Insignificant Others’ interest in what queer politics looks like without intensive sensuality. Anaesthetic Aesthetics takes up artistic innovations developed out of the paradox of aestheticizing cancer, a uniquely anaesthetizing experience (e.g. analgesics, chronic fatigue, diminished appetites, hypogonadism), spanning Alice James to Octavia Butler.
Selected Publications:
"Spinster Regionalism: Asexuality, Genre, and Type in the Shadow of Consumer Desire," American Literature (Forthcoming December 2025).
"Odd Women, New Women, and the Problem of Erotic Indifference in Late-Victorian Feminism," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 49, no. 2.