Areas of specialization
Twentieth century American literary and political history; book history and bibliography; African American print cultures; the sociology of literature; literature and radical politics; intelligence agencies and Cold War culture.
Dissertation
“Movement Literatures in the Postwar U.S. Literary Field”
My dissertation is about the literary movement as a social form of artistic activity in the post-World War II United States. I argue that such movements blend the cultural agitation of the avant-garde and the organizational logic of the social movement. These self-conscious collectives make literature the center of a rich social life, flouting the tradition of writerly solitude that predominated in midcentury America.
My project traces the development of the movement paradigm in its eccentric infrastructures: writers’ workshops, handmade “underground” magazines, bohemian book dealers, community museums, alternative book prizes and foundations, publishing patrons, college English departments, and more. These common institutions and social structures link an array of collectives that are typically studied separately under the rubric of the “avant-garde” or within ethnic literary traditions. I approach such movements comparatively in a multiethnic literary field.
Dissertation committee: Andrew Goldstone (co-chair), Carter Mathes (co-chair), Leah Price, and Jeff Lawrence
Published Articles
“Flip This House: Caroline Emmerton’s Activist Hermeneutics and The House of the Seven Gables.” The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 51, no. 2 (December 2025): 192-219. https://doi.org/10.5325/nathhawtrevi.51.2.0192.
“‘Heaven save the market!’: Henry James in the Fin de Siècle Literary Field.” The Henry James Review 45, no. 2 (2024): 171-186. https://doi.org/10.1353/hjr.2024.a926113.
Conference Presentations
“Book Magic: Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Text”
Black Bibliography Project
Conference, April 2026: “Networking Black Print: Reimagining Black Bibliography”
“Typing in ‘Boyland’: Literary Community and Secretarial Labor in Beat Movement Magazines”
American Literature Association
Annual Conference, May 2025: Postwar Area Group
“Books Undercover: Cryptobibliography in the Cold War”
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
Annual Conference, July 2024: “Global Book Cultures”
“New Alignments: The Bluest Eye‘s Black Pagecraft”
Society for Textual Scholarship
Annual Conference, June 2023: “Design and Text”
“Toni Morrison and Book Design”
Program in Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina
Annual Conference, February 2023: “Print: Histories, Theories, Futures”
“Chartism and the Political Ecology of Jane Eyre”
Princeton-Rutgers Victorian Symposium
Annual Conference, April 2022: “Print Ecologies”