Visiting Assistant Professor
I am a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Boston University. My research considers modernism’s interest in embodiment—notably, how modernism envisioned the body as under regular threat of disease, disability, gender flux, and racial slippage. Throughout my work, I locate the medical and quasi-medical origins undergirding long-form narratives about health and disability in the early twentieth century. Nineteenth century socio-medical discourses rapidly reached a fever pitch of paranoia in the moment of early modernism and newly framed the body as the site of social and moral deviance, from disease and disability to miscegenation and gender play. In my research, I trace this story as rendered in the literature and popular discourse of the time to show how the political, social, and cultural instability of the modernist moment was attached to disruptions in bodies along with their representations in art and literature.
Alongside my research, I teach courses in British and Irish modernism, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglophone literature, and special topics courses on disability studies and the works of James Joyce. Over the years, I have taught at the University of Florida, Oklahoma State University, and now Boston University. My courses are discussion based and aim to cultivate student-led inquiry and dialogue. You can find some of my scholarly work in James Joyce Quarterly, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, James Joyce Literary Supplement, The Modernist Review, and Joyce Writing Disability.
For a full CV please click here
Teaching and Research Interests
19th– and 20th-century British and Irish literature
Modernist studies
Art and visual culture
Masculinity and embodiment
Disability studies and medical humanities
Colonial and postcolonial literatures
British fiction about Latin America
Joyce, Woolf, and Conrad
Selected Publications
“The Aesthetic Turn in Disability and Degeneration,” Disability on the Cusp: Transitions, Transformations, Intersections, Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures (forthcoming 2024)
“Joyce, Bloom, and Max Nordau.” Review of Unfit: Jewish Degeneration and Modernism, Marilyn Reizbaum, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019. James Joyce Literary Supplement (2024)
“‘Dark men in mien and movement’: Blindness and the Body in Ulysses,” Joyce Writing Disability. Ed. Jeremy Colangelo, Gainesville: University of Florida Press (2022)
“Physical Culture and the Aesthetics of Jewish Regeneration in Ulysses,” James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 58.3, Spring, University of Tulsa (2021)
“A Modernist Teaches Analysis,” Who Teaches Writing, ed. Joshua Daniel, Open Educational Resources, Oklahoma State University Libraries (2021)
“Protein Powders and Pastes: Muscle Foods for the Twentieth Century Man,” The Modernist Review (2020)