A specialist in British Romanticism, I work at the intersection of poetics and critical theory, with a particular interest in how literary language both registers and participates in the historical production of race. My current book project, The Rhetoric of Racialization: British Romanticism and Everyday Antiblackness, elucidates the quotidian figural operations that consolidated logics of antiblackness in the early nineteenth century. Where most critical histories of race emphasize the role of Enlightenment philosophy and the rise of bioscience, my book directs attention to the literariness of race-making to show how British Romantic-era writers and political movements insidiously strengthened the rhetorical economy of chattel slavery as its institutional infrastructure began to be dismantled.  

 

Ph.D., Emory University, 2015 

B.A., University of Minnesota, 2008 

 

The Point of Impasse, special issue of Comparative Literature 72.2, co-edited with Jan Mieszkowski (June 2020).  

 

“Romantic Hope and ‘Black Despair’”: A Brief History,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36.2 (April 2024): 293-297. 

 

“Race-Making and Romanticism: Notes on Pedagogy and the Position of Whiteness,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36.2 (April 2024): 337-345. 

 

Review of “Ignatius Sancho’s London: Recovering Black Communities in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 36.2 (April 2024): 381-384. 

 

“Romanticism and the Rhetoric of Racialization,” in “Race, Blackness, and Romanticism,” ed. Patricia A. Matthew, special issue of Studies in Romanticism 61.1 (Spring 2022): 35-46. 

 

“Impasse? What Impasse? Berlant, de Man, and the Intolerable Present,” Comparative Literature 72.2 (June 2020): 180-202. 

 

“Romanticism and the Poetics of Political Despair,” ELH 86.4 (Winter 2019): 967-995. 

 

“Skeptical Ignorance: Hume, Shelley, and the Mystery of ‘Mont Blanc,’” MLQ 79.1 (March 2018): 53-80. 

 

“Limited Analogies: Reading Relations in Wordsworth’s The Borderers,” Studies in Romanticism 56.2 (Summer 2017): 177-201. 

 

Review of Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America, in Romantic Circles (August 2016). 

 

“The Ends of Pleasure,” review of Rowan Boyson, Wordsworth and the Enlightenment Idea of Pleasure, in The Eighteenth Century 57.1 (Spring 2016): 157-161. 

 

“Ritual Remembrance: Freud's Primal Theory of Collective Memory,” SubStance 42.1 (2013): 102-119. 

 

“Little White Similes: The Figure of Comparison and the White Feminist Tradition,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Washington DC, August 2024. 

 

“Race-Making and Romanticism,” Anti-Racist Pedagogy Contest, North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Huntsville, TX, March 2023. 

 

“The Figure of Slavery and the Logic of Blackface.” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR), Huntsville, TX, March 2023. 

 

“Reading Against Racism,” lecture at the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Healthcare Dinner, N.C. State University, March, 2023. 

 

“Shelley’s Blackface ‘Mask,’” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), St. Louis, MO, March, 2023. 

 

“Rhetorical Reading and the Question of White Abolitionism,” North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR) and the British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS), Liverpool, England, August, 2022. 

 

Roundtable on “Blackness, Romanticism, and the British Atlantic,” Modern Language Association (MLA), Washington, DC, January, 2022. 

 

“Romanticism and the Rhetoric of Racialization,” Black Studies and Romanticism: A Virtual Conference, sponsored by the Mount Holyoke English Department & the Critical Social Thought Program, June, 2021.