I am Lecturer in the Department of Communication & Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My current research and teaching interests include post45 literature, science fiction/fantasy, literary theory, visual media, and cultural studies. I study and teach these fields because they allow me to answer fundamental questions about the status and possibility of art and to respond to the question of what it means to live in an unequal world. These fields offer creative ways of understanding, representing, and narrating the structures that prop up that inequality. They also help make alternative—better—worlds imaginable and thinkable. For me, then, the creative work of criticism and teaching is a matter of utopian thought and possibility.

I am currently working on two book projects. The first is an edited volume, and experiment in collaborative pedagogy-as-research, titled Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature. Academia severs research and teaching, rewarding the former (especially when conducted by tenured and tenure-track faculty) and erasing the labor of the latter (especially when performed by an underclass of contingent faculty members). Given this, I argue that teacher-scholars need to more consciously deliberate what, how, and why we teach. In so doing, the book foregrounds the intensification of academic labor and articulates the value of teaching as scholarly productivity in its own right. Our students’ education, and our work, are increasingly defined by the defunding of education, austerity, an emphasis on STEM and business as the only viable paths to gainful employment, a common-sense conviction that education should be vocational rather than intellectually enriching, and a restriction of liberal arts education to elite holders of social capital. Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature assesses this state of the profession from the perspective of teaching very contemporary literature. It then offers a series of practical teaching guides by seasoned teacher-scholars (representing a wide range of career tracks and educational institutions). Contributors provide teaching-focused analyses of key twenty-first century texts, demonstrating along the way how they successfully teach them in the undergraduate classroom. Innovative but never gimmicky, Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature gets down to the business of teaching literature of, in, and for the twenty-first century.

A second project, tentatively titled The Invention of Speculative Fiction, has me visiting archives and special collections to examine the papers of influential—but now overlooked—editors, agents, fans, and writing workshop faculty in the field of science fiction and fantasy: Donald A. Wollheim (founding editor in chief of Ace Books and DAW Books), Terry Carr, Frederick Pohl, and Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm (founders of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop) among others. My supposition in embarking on this research is that science fiction aesthetics, after the 1952 founding of Ace Books, became both more corporate and more literary—in a word, professionalized. I seek to understand what superseded the interwar and Depression-era of fanzines and amateur publishing and their sometimes utopian and socialist politics. What, in short, is the legacy have these publishing workers left on the field of what we now call, broadly, speculative fiction?

I recently co-edited William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture (U of Iowa P, 2021) with Mathias Nilges. The book brings together renowned scholars from the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Japan, plus major science fiction authors Malka Older and Charles Yu, to assess the global impact of Gibson’s work on post-1970s literature and culture. I also co-edited “Genres of Empire” (2023) a special double issue of College Literature, with Alyssa A. Hunziker, which ollects essays on genre fiction’s ability to make visible structures of imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, and climate apartheid. Some of my other recent publications appear in, or are forthcoming, in ASAP/Journal, Post45: Contemporaries, College Literature, Cultural Critique, and Public Books, among others. I am also a contributing and commissioning editor at ASAP/Review, the online forum of the Association for the Study of the Arts in the Present. Please query me if are interested in contributing writing or multimodal projects about the contemporary arts.

I earned my Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida, where I was awarded a Graduate School Fellowship and a Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship. Before joining RPI, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta.