Research Interests 

Broadly speaking, my research focuses on literature that highlights the experiences of disenfranchised and vulnerable populations. Writing on novels such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones (2011), I aim, first, to elucidate the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit the populations these novels represent; and second, to commemorate the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance. Toward this end, my book project, “Abandoned Subjects: The Sociality of Survival in Modern American Literature,” asks how literature negotiates the relationship between dispossession and subjectivity through depictions of “inhabiting”; that is, through the subject’s making space to live where space has been withheld due to processes of marginalization. This literature expresses a deep ambivalence toward representational structures and uplift projects. Its authors, I argue, attempt to resolve this ambivalence by having their protagonists render their abandonment as a practice of spatial intervention, theorizing a form of subjectivity that engenders modes of existence and socialities of dispossession beyond the politics of scarcity and recognition. The driving question of this study is, then, how can the concept of abandonment allow us to address its subject without absorbing it into an injurious system of evaluation?

Public & Applied Humanities

As a program administrator, I have facilitated cross-disciplinary collaborations in order to make humanities content accessible to communities beyond the university walls. Most significantly, as a Program Coordinator at the Humanities Institute (HI) at the University of Texas at Austin, I developed and secured funding through an NEH Digital Projects for the Public grant for a project that is collecting and digitally curating community health narratives from underserved communities in Central Texas. Communities of Care: Documenting Voices of Healing and Endurance will allow members of the public and researchers in the humanities, social sciences, and medicine to reflect on what these stories say about how rural and minority communities experience and respond creatively to health disparities, and how they advocate for more inclusive and comprehensive healthcare.

Second, I developed, in partnership with the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, the Austin Public Library, and the Central Texas Library System, a proposal for a Community Conversations program designed to promote health literacy in Central Texas’ most vulnerable communities. This project would develop and seed a curriculum of public dialogues on difficult topics relating to health, well-being, and healing, facilitated using humanities content and methods.

Health Humanities

Motivated by my work on Communities of Care, I’ve become increasingly attentive to the stories of illness running through the poverty literature that I study. My research and teaching interests have thus evolved toward health narratives in contemporary U.S. women’s novels, which will form and basis of my second book. This project will build on my current inquiry into how literature both fosters and depicts creative responses to disenfranchisement, turning to the ecologies of care in post-Reaganomics landscapes. I ask how authors such as Linda Hogan, Dorothy Allison, Bonnie Jo Campbell, and Jesmyn Ward address what constitutes vulnerable or healthy persons and societies and rethink healing amid limited resources.

In 2021, I organized and received funding from the Hersher Institute for Applied Ethics at Sacred Heart University for a faculty working group on the Systems and Practices of Care: From the Vantage Point of the Health Humanities. Recent scholarship interested in identifying modes of resistance among marginalized communities to processes of dispossession, exploitation, and subjugation has turned to examining informal and at times proscribed practices of care. Paralleling this trend is renewed attention to the forms of violence that accompany care, particularly in a health and wellness system entangled with the logic of settler colonial capitalism. This working group read and discussed current scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences that address institutional and non-institutional practices of care in order to grapple with the ethics of such practices in health systems, social welfare, and survival work.