About
Education: Honors A.B. in English Literature, Washington University in St. Louis, 2016; Thesis: “Imagining Home Abroad: National Identity and the Individual Artist in T. S. Eliot and James Joyce”
Very and increasingly Midwestern. First generation university graduate. Often found in Toronto. Loudly into pop music, video essays, and apples.
My pedagogy starts with the assumption that students want to learn. They understand why writing matters, and they want to get better. Our job, as educators, is twofold: to help them articulate and demonstrate what they already know, and to help them recognize and build to what they have left to learn. In teaching composition, I emphasize the necessity to be as clear and grounded as possible, to make sure that each and every sentence/paragraph builds on the one that comes before it, and to avoid vague or overblown language and claims. We work together to think about why and how different aspects of writing, from grammar to argumenation, matter in our lives, right here and right now. Reading and writing are always aesthetic and attentional exercises, and in my classes we practice and hone both faculties. Teaching is the most important thing any of us is likely to do in the academy, and I consider it an immense privilege to have students trust me enough to share their works-in-progress.
Meanwhile, my research primarily follows, across various genres and through the long turn into the twentieth century, three byways. The first traces the cultural capital that texts accrue over time. Are some texts really better or more valuable than others? What should we read? What do different reading populations bring to the same texts? I like to call myself a hoarder of unread books, not just because I have a spare bedroom filled with tomes I’ve never opened, but also because I’m interested in thinking about and with books that others don’t value enough to even consider opening. The second scrutinizes how embodied experience is represented textually. What do pain and sickness feel like? How do we go about expressing them? What are the limitations inherent to sharing one’s cognitive or neurological idiosyncrasies? What leads someone to die by suicide, and how is that process translated for reading audiences? How do texts mediate, script, and determine phenomenological experience? The third asks what are the ethical dimensions to writing about others. How should we think about animals? How should we write about insanity? How do authors attempt to handle national, racial, and gender boundaries, as well as boundary crossings? Where is the line between appreciation and appropriation? Who has the right to access different forms and ways of being? Broadly speaking, I’m interested in sympathy and empathy as competing models for how to think about others responsibly. Central to all my research questions is the presence of power and the legacies of injustice, working with particular attention to how members of marginalized groups represent themselves and are (mis)represented by others.
Fields: Global Anglophone (1850ish–1950ish), literary modernisms, fin de siècle Britain, transatlanticism, popular fiction and poetry, colonial literatures, genre studies
Interests: Historicism, methodology, reception history, canon formation, transnationalism, empire, embodiment, suicide, ethics, sympathy
