Educational Background
- B.A., Princeton University, 2002
- M.A., University of Michigan, 2005
- Ph.D., University of Michigan, 2009
My research and teaching focus on transatlantic modernist literature, and I’m particularly interested in how literary forms interact with material contexts. The central dynamic animating all of my work is how genres—both literary genres (the novel, lyric, biography) and extra-literary ones (conventions governing the design of printed books, periodicals, illustrations, frontispieces, dust jackets, and competitive media forms like telegrams and advertisements)—are mixed and juxtaposed to create new material and textual forms. My work explores how modernist authors and publishers drew upon various textual and paratextual traditions and past forms to play upon, to appeal to, and ultimately to refashion readerly expectations.
I’m currently revising my dissertation into my first book project, Modernism’s Material Forms: Literary Experiments in Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1945. The modernist authors and publishers that I examine—Henry James, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and Horace Liveright—understood acts of reading in modernity as inherently material encounters. I argue that these modernists radically redefined literary genres and refashioned the material forms through which their literary experiments reached the public. I’ve also begun to develop my second book-length research project, Telegraphic Modernism: Rewiring the Modern Novel. In this project, I examine the ways in which modern authors including Henry James, E.M. Forster, and Ford Madox Ford invoke telegraphy—with its public circulation, its networks of transmission, and its strange coded idiom—to re-conceptualize the modern novel. I have also begun researching a third book project, Volume Bound: Circulation in Twentieth-Century American Poetry, concentrating on the site of the volume in twentieth-century American poetry. Volume Bound argues that Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, and Elizabeth Bishop—poets most often read in de-contextualizing anthologies—explore alternative cover designs, front matter, organization, and typographical layouts to map out new poetic geographies in the volume format.
I bring the archival resources and central questions from my research into the classroom. This year at Oberlin I’ll be teaching courses focused on modern novels, modernist women writers, material modernism, and a freshman seminar on “Modernism as Media.”
