About
I’m an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. My research and teaching interests include early and nineteenth-century US literature, African American literature, US ethnic literatures, and critical race and ethnic studies.
As a literary and cultural studies scholar, I am broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literature and culture. My work primarily deals with how violence arises out of and impacts capitalist social relations and ideological production, especially as it relates to notions of selfhood, ownership, and state power across the long nineteenth century.
Right now, I’m at work on my book project, At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in US Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened American liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set. Education
PhD, English, University of Connecticut, 2016
MA, English, University of Connecticut, 2012
BA, summa cum laude, English, University of Pittsburgh, 2010 Projects
At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in American Culture. Manuscript in preparation.
Killing Them Softly: Motherhood, Violence, and the State in the American Cultural Imaginary. Manuscript in preparation.
