I am a doctoral candidate at Cornell University. I finished my BA from the University of North Dakota and my MA from Portland State University. My work is in global/postcolonial literature and theory (most frequently in 20th and 21st century Irish literature and poetry), body politics, and disability studies.

Working towards my dissertation, I anticipate a project exploring the role of the stomach as a recurring corporeal actor in world literature. Digestion has historically offered authors and critics a rich vocabulary by which to consider the formation of the modern industrial state, white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism, body theory, and the history of science writing. In addition to this metaphorical dimension, I want to argue that texts such as Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching posit the stomach and its attendants as a crucial (and literally visceral) means of understanding both the material and abstracted dimensions of globalized space and time. The stomach is thus a major, under-theorized figure around which literature coalesces to expand how we understand the bodily inhabitation of space, and the passage of time. Such inhabitations, temporalities, and sensations, I maintain, are made possible via the literary.

To this effect, my work is often multi-disciplinary, exploring the transportability of literary scholarship to work in political theory, sociology, and the medical humanities. You can download a copy of my most recent CV here.

Outside of academia, I enjoy writing creatively, knitting, hiking, horseback riding, building a design portfolio for an imaginary HGTV show, singing, tending a growing army of succulents, and spending time with my aggressively fluffy cat.