Research and Writing

My first book project, The Disinherited: A 20th Century American Literary History, 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 tracks the intellectual and cultural history of an idea; and, in so doing, it opens an aperture onto the history of race, property, slavery, reproduction, kinship, and rights in the Americas. Historically, “the disinherited” have been written out of the archival record: redacted from wills, cut out of family photos, and deleted from account books. I argue, however, that the history of the 20th century American novel should be told as a history of writing “the disinherited” back in. With this reframing, the American novel emerges as a rich site of political and ethical reflection of questions of historical exclusion, debt, and obligation.

The various stories of disinheritance I assemble—from piracy in the Caribbean to land theft in the American midwest, from the promise of spiritual salvation to abandoned illegitimate children, and from industrial disasters to insurrectionary struggle—ultimately amount to nothing short of an alternative history of the American novel while upending some of our most entrenched presumptions about progressive social movements. Typically, we think of these movements as demanding change and social transformation. The Disinherited uncovers a long history of writers, activists, organizers and politicians demanding restoration and reparations instead. Ultimately, to ask who are America’s “disinherited” inevitably leads to a far bigger question. What visions of justice and redress are articulated at different points in American history?

Alongside teaching courses in American and British 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.