My academic research expands the archive of literature and medicine by exploring life writing in conjunction with scientific and cultural models of personhood, agency, and wellness. I am currently at work on a book project, “Pathographies: Sensation, Susceptibility, and Desire in Nineteenth-Century America.”
My interest in interdisciplinary scholarship began in Chicago with my work as Programming Fellow with the Chicago Humanities Festival and as English faculty at The Odyssey Project of Illinois Humanities. After moving to Indiana, I continued to focus on making academia accessible to broad audiences, serving as Scholar-Facilitator for the Next Indiana Humanities Campfires Trek & Talk series on ecological literature and environmental stewardship. Then, as Project Director of Thirteenth: Literature and Legacy (2017), I partnered with university and community institutions to organize a reading and conversation series funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and Indiana Humanities. This semester-long program generated community dialogue about three centuries of U.S. history and African American literature, culminating in a reexamination of race, mass incarceration, and social justice in the twenty-first century. From 2019-2021 I co-edited Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
I completed my Ph.D. at Northwestern University in 2013, with subsequent teaching appointments at:
Northwestern University (2013-14): Visiting Assistant Professor of English; Instructor in the Medical Humanities & Bioethics program at the Feinberg School of Medicine
Indiana University Kokomo (2014-19): Assistant Professor of English; Indiana University Bicentennial Professor (2019-20, declined)
I now live in the Bay Area where I am Chair of the English Department at Menlo School in Atherton, CA. My writing has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly, Literature and Medicine, ESQ, Callaloo, and Arab Studies Quarterly.