I am a scholar of English literature with a particular focus on the history of the novel from the nineteenth century to the present. In my dissertation project, entitled “Reparative, Resentful, Queer, Parasitic: Varieties of Rewriting, 1900–Present,” I look at rewrites—works that either transpose, revise, or rework a novelistic predecessor, often through perspectival shifts or emphasis on a minor character. My project asks why rewriting has come to dominate contemporary fiction. My contention is that rewriting opens up counterfactual possibilities and subverts the novelistic imperative of an ending, thus enabling forms of artistic reparation. Whereas novelistic rewrites are usually understood as postmodern or postcolonial concerns, I show that rewrites are critical to the aesthetics and politics of all Anglophone fiction. Specifically, I re-situate modernist authors as rewriters, arguing that the practice reaches a tipping point at the turn of the twentieth century. Through case studies of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster, I show that the modernists were above all concerned with, as Woolf puts it, how to “re-write history.” Pieces of scholarship from my dissertation are forthcoming in Modern Language Quarterly and Modernism/modernity.

At Harvard, I formerly ran the English Department Graduate Colloquia (field-specific meeting groups), and in that capacity organized annual Fall Symposia. I have taught for the Humanities 10 Program at Harvard, for which I am now the Head Teaching Fellow, as well as teaching in the junior tutorial program and serving as a teaching fellow for department survey courses. In my public-facing work for venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Harvard Review, I bring the tools of literary criticism to a public audience. I am also a contributing reviewer for Modern Fiction Studies.

You can find a copy of my CV here.