Biography
I received my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2023 and hold an M.A. in Psychology from NYU. Broadly, I am interested in the way literary form and style refract shifting embodied and intimate norms, with particular attention to gender, sexuality, disability, and racialization across the 19th and 20th centuries.
I am at work on two book projects:
Insignificant Others: Literary Experiments in Early Asexuality, takes up fin-de-siècle texts about celibacy that fail to achieve erotic and narrative drive, but instead innovating alternative forms (e.g. the sketch, the short story cycle) amenable to solitude, stillness, and distance. I read this corpus as an aesthetic reactions to emergence of sexuality across this period, and as an early instance of asexual cultural production. These texts provocatively position asexuality as radically disruptive of social and literary norms (e.g. emergent consumer culture, reproductive futurity, compulsory sexuality).
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.
I teach courses on media literacy/analysis, literary history, and the medical humanities.
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.