I am Lecturer of Communication and Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My current research and teaching interests include 21st and 20th century 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 major projects. The first is an edited volume titled Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature. Academia severs and hierarchizes research and teaching, rewarding the former and too often erasing the labor of the latter. Given this, I argue that we teacher-scholars need to more consciously deliberate what, how, and why we teach—if for no other reasons than to foreground the intensification of academic labor and to articulate the value of teaching as scholarly productivity in its own right. Our students’ education and our work are increasingly defined by the defunding of public 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 master classes on teaching by a diverse group of experienced teacher-scholars (representing a wide range of career tracks and educational institutions). Each contributor presents a teaching-focused analysis of key text that they have taught successfully in the undergraduate or high school classroom and walks the reader through an activity tailored to that text. 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 Science Fiction, has me visiting archives and special collections to examine the papers of influential science fiction and fantasy editors, fans, agents, and writing workshop faculty: Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr, Frederick Pohl, and Damon Knight among others. My supposition in embarking on this research is that science fiction aesthetics became, after the 1952 founding of Ace Books, a kind of corporate authorship. I seek to understand what superseded the interwar and postwar era of fan-driven zines and publishing. How were the relatively concerted politics of fan communities atomized with the professionalization of publishing work? And what legacy have these publishing workers left on the field of contemporary 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/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.