[B.A., English and American Literature, New York University]

My dissertation, "Empire of Neglect: Caribbean Literature, British Liberalism, and New Works of Care, 1776-1888," tracks an antagonistic relationship between British political economy and British West Indian literary production, arguing that creole writers responded to the dissolution of the "old colonial system" and the divestment of British economic, affective, and political capital through hemispheric cultural resources. The nineteenth-century British West Indies, I suggest, are too neatly territorialized into pre-given scales of analysis, whether this scale is British empire, the Atlantic world, or, more recently, the hemispheric Americas. The literary archive I explore illustrates the entangled nature, but also the ephemerality, of familiar literary and political cartographies. 

I co-organized Transnationalism: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?, an interdisciplinary conference on transnational methodologies held at Penn in March 2012.

Publications:

"The Limbs of Empire: Ahab, Santa Anna, and Moby-Dick," American Literature 83.1 (2011): 29-57

"Sharing Time: C.L.R. James and Southern Agrarian Movements," Social Text 111 (May 2012, forthcoming)