Assistant Professor, English & Communications
Creativity & Survival
Gender & Global Modernisms
Introduction to Literature
Introduction to Visual Culture
MASS MoCA Immersion
Visions & Voices: American Ethnic Literature & Art
My research and teaching examine the intersections of creative expression and the survival of structural traumas in literature and visual culture from the modernist period to the present. My work is especially interested in how writers and artists make use of aesthetic possibilities to enact life-affirming counternarratives of care and kinship.
I am currently at work on a book project that traces an alternative history of modernism and crisis to show how modernists who wrote out of the experience of systemic oppression expand representations of trauma beyond fractured narratives of war and sudden accident. I am the co-creator and co-director of a public humanities and arts project, CARE SYLLABUS—a multimodal and justice-centered education resource that I have developed with the contemporary art museum, MASS MoCA.
“Interfacing Grief: Haptic Autotheory & Performance as Afterlife in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2022)
“Care and the Contingencies of Critique,” ASAP/J (2021)
“Clean, Original, Primitive”: Sexual Radicalism, Race Consciousness, and the Case of Harlem’s Queers,” Modernism/modernity Print+ (2021)
“The Art of Care: Susannah Cahalan on Madness, Diagnosis, and COVID-19,” Public Books (2020)
"Embodied Haunting: Aesthetics and the Archive in Toni Morrison's Beloved" in Madness in Black Women's Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance and the Practice of Diaspora. Ed. Caroline Brown and Johanna Garvey. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
"Minoritarian Modernisms Roundtable," Between the Acts: An MSA Digital Conference, April 2022
“Caremaking: Beyond Dynamics of Give and Take,” ASAP/12, Virtual, October 2021
“Care Practices: A Panel Discussion,” The Wattis Institute at California College of the Arts, Virtual, May 2021
“Institutions & the Crisis of Care,” College Art Association, Virtual, February 2020
“Trauma Studies: A Prognosis, Modern Language Association, Virtual, January, 2020
MCLA Professor Reflects on Fellowship at Yale's Beinecke Library (Fall 2022)
Leading Classes, and National Conversations, on Care and the Therapeutic Arts (Spring 2022)
New MCLA/MASS MoCA Collaboration Explores the Meaning of Care (Fall 2020)
MCLA English Professor to Complete Brandeis University Fellowship (Fall 2020)
