I am Lecturer of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My current research and teaching interests include 21st and 20th century literatures, science fiction, literary theory, 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 writing a monograph titled The Art of Genre: Utopia and the Contemporary Artist Novel. My book takes an original approach to genre theory by elaborating an unacknowledged kinship—both formal and political—between two seemingly disparate generic registers: the artist novel (Künstlerroman) and speculative fiction. The plot of an artist novel is a dramatization of the creation of the novel itself, so this genre is sharply attuned to the changing nature of literary production, institutionality, and the conditions of creative labor at any given historical moment. As such, the artist novel is a vivid entry into the question of what makes novels novels. My answer is that novels speculate. Against the myopia of much recent realist literary fiction, the contemporary artist novel recovers this speculative quality with its incorporation and creative reworking of genres like science fiction, fantasy, post-apocalyptic narratives, and climate fiction. Critics frequently remind us of the truism that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The novels I treat in my book contravene this “capitalist realist” discourse that dominates our contemporary culture. As I ultimately argue, utopian speculation is endemic to the novel form. Bypassing the tired impasse over the relative value of literary and genre fiction in favor of the novel’s speculative nature, I offer an account of what novels can teach us when utopian speculation seems like a relic of the past.

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. GoE collects essays on genre fiction’s ability to make visible structures of imperialism, colonialism, settler colonialism, and climate apartheid. Some of my other recent scholarly publications appear in, or are forthcoming, in ASAP/Journal, Post45: Contemporaries, College Literature, and Public Books, among others. I am also a contributing and commissioning editor at ASAP/J, 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.

Originally from Nova Scotia, Canada, I earned my B.A. with First Class Honors at St. Francis Xavier University. In 2021, 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 spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of English at Emory University in Atlanta.