B.A. English, U.C. Berkeley

M.A. University of Pennsylvania

My dissertation reads foundational texts of colonial New England's first half century to show how reform Protestant ideology mobilized affective discourse as a primary technique of social adminitration, and through that emotional speech and writing, attempted to create a civil society that would perfect politics beyond the behavioral prescriptions of the state. My research revises literary histories of the early Atlantic world through close readings supplemented by the insights of affect theory and political geography in order to complicate and estrange the self-evident salience of an archive long familiar in genealogies of American belonging. 

I teach broadly across the literature curriculum and I write for popular readership about space, terrestrial and otherwise, and about the U.S.-Mexico border.