About

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow of Literature and Medical Humanities in the UC Santa Barbara Department of English, as well as a faculty member in the Bard College Language and Thinking program. My teaching and research explore topics related to literary modernism, cultural approaches to health, illness, and disability, experiential learning in professional writing pedagogy, and the role of writing and the arts in precipitating social change. My current book project “The Birth of the Literary Clinic: Modernism, Bibliotherapy, and the Aesthetics of Health, 1916-1944” excavates a link between the work of American modernist writers such as Kenneth Burke, Djuna Barnes, and Jean Toomer, and early twentieth-century efforts to promote the practice of therapeutic reading. I have studied the contemporary application of this research on the history of reading for mental health as a 2015-2016 Humanities New York Public Humanities Fellow. I am also interested in contemporary small press literary culture and am Managing Reviews Editor for Full Stop Magazine (www.full-stop.net), a web publication aimed at engaging with contemporary literature and publishing with a focus on debuts, small press publications, and works in translation.