I am a lecturer in the Department of Communication & Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My current research and teaching interests include post45 literature, speculative fiction, and other popular genres. 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 titled Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature: Essays from the Classroom. Academia severs research and teaching, rewarding the former (especially when conducted by tenured and tenure-track faculty) and making invisible the labor of the latter (especially when performed by an underclass of contingent faculty and workers who teach). Given this, I argue that teacher-scholars need to more consciously deliberate about what, how, and why we teach. The book foregrounds the intensification of academic labor and articulates the value of teaching as scholarly productivity in its own right. Deeply situated in instructors’ classrooms, institutions, geographic regions, and national contexts, this volume’s avid and accessible essays share innovative pedagogies tailored to key twenty-first century texts while giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at the labor of teaching in today’s classrooms. Covering a range of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and graphic novels, Teaching Twenty-First Century Literature provides literature teachers at tertiary and secondary schools an indispensable guide for an emergent canon of literature. The book assembles experienced teachers from across the career spectrum, who tell compelling stories about what it means to teach contemporary literature in a diverse array of institutions, and provides innovative lessons, activities, and strategies to meet the needs of our students.

A second project, tentatively titled Universe Makers: Utopianism, Fascism, and Speculative Fiction after 1938,has me visiting archives to examine the papers of influential—but now overlooked—editors, agents, fans, and writing workshop faculty in the field of speculative fiction: 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, professionalized, and more literary. I seek to understand how this industry superseded the interwar and Depression-era of fanzines and amateur publishing and their sometimes utopian, socialist, and egalitarian politics. What, I ask, is the legacy of these publishing workers and how can their endeavors help us reignite the progressive utopianism of speculative fiction, which today is often co-opted by the far-right and their xenophobic, white supremacist, apocalyptic, and anti-democratic worldbuilding projects?

I recently co-edited William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture(U of Iowa P, 2021) with Mathias Nilges and “Genres of Empire” (2023) a special double issue of College Literature, with Alyssa A. Hunziker. Some of my other recent publications appear in ASAP/Journal, 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.