Research and Writing

My first book project, The Disinherited: A New Literary History of America, offers the first cultural and intellectual history of the figure of “the disinherited” within post-1865 American fiction. Bringing together an eclectic archive that includes literary fiction, political manifestos, political propaganda, economic doctrine, and legal history, The Disinherited, interrogates how, when and why this idea speaks to the descendants of the enslaved, the colonized, and the proletarianized. Historically, “the disinherited” have been written out of the archival record: cut out of family photos, deleted from account books, and scratched out of wills. I argue, however, that the history of the twentieth century American novel should be told as a history of writing “the disinherited” back in. To trace the cultural legacy of “the disinherited” is thus not to locate a stable subject, a coherent political position, or a singular account of dispossession. Instead, it is to open an aperture onto the violently contested history of race, property, reproduction, kinship, rights, and reparations in the Americas.

Alongside teaching courses in American literature, gender and sexuality studies, rhetoric and composition, I have also taught courses in feminist theory and queer literature at Taconic Correctional Facility with Columbia’s Center for Justice in Education. My second book project, provisionally titled The Classroom and the Cell: Prison, Education and the University, stems from this teaching experience and it is motivated by one key question. What history of prisons and higher education emerges once we examine who is encouraged to teach in prison at different moments? Through addressing this question The Classroom and the Cell aims to excavate the material and ideological links between educational theory and liberal penology across the long twentieth century.

At present I am working on two articles related to this second project. The first,“The Classroom, the Cell, and the Laboratory: Prison Education as Experiment?,” exposes and assesses the impact of behavior science, behavior modification techniques, and theories of human capital on the development of prison education programs in the early 1970s. The second, currently titled "Sentimental Rubbish," interrogates the construction and representation of maternal attachment and mother-child bonding in accounts of America’s first prison nursery.

Besides working on these projects, I have published several articles at the intersection of contemporary culture, media, feminism, and reproductive politics. You can find my academic writing in Diacritics, Novel, Post45, Feminist Modernist Studies, Modernism/ Modernity Print Plus, The Modernist Review, Literature and Medicine, and Catalyst, among others. I am the recipient of the Miron Cristo-Loveanu Prize from Columbia University, and the Jean Helen Macleod Prize from the University of Edinburgh, and my research has been supported by the Humanities Center Initiative, the Heyman Center, and the Thouron Award.