Biography
Assistant Instructional Professor, Master of Arts Program in the Humanities, Department of English Language and Literature, The College
Affiliate Faculty, Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture
I received my Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in 2018, and I’ve been working as a preceptor at MAPH since 2014. Before that, I earned a B.A. in philosophy and history from the University of California, Berkeley. My teaching and research center on American literature and culture from the late nineteenth century to the present, with an emphasis on histories of gender and sexuality as they intersect with race and class. I’m particularly interested in women’s cultural production and feminist political struggle around biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. I am invested in analyzing U.S. cultures of reproduction in relation to biopolitical modes of regulating citizenship and national belonging—histories of eugenics and sterilization, slavery and racial segregation, immigration quotas and exclusion, settler colonialism and federal Indian policy. I also teach courses on queer and trans theoretical, literary, and cinematic explorations of history and temporality, affect, intimacy, trauma, and political struggles around sexuality. I focus in particular on how queer and trans theory and cultural production contest heteronormative imperatives around maturity, generation, marriage, and progress, insofar as they dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Finally, my research and teaching interests include the history of science, technology, and medicine as centered on the gendered and sexed body, particularly sexology and its afterlives, as well as histories of trans medicine, assisted reproductive technology, and birth control. I am a proud member of Faculty Forward/SEIU Local 73, the contingent faculty union at the University of Chicago.
Current/Upcoming Courses:
In a Queer Time and Place (Winter 2025)
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s boldest interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and its governing logics; they question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, the times and spaces of sex and intimacy, and the past/present/future divide. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freccero, Halberstam, Keeling, Love, Muñoz, Freeman, Snorton, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Sadie Benning, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others.
Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities and humanistic social sciences.
Reproductive citizens: gender, work, and the body (Spring 2025)
In this class, we focus on literature, film, history, and theory that deal with biological and social reproduction, motherhood and the politics of the home and family, and domestic and sexual labor. Our readings and viewings are centered in the U.S. and span the early twentieth century through the present—and we approach the above themes and structures in relation to the troubled and uneven histories of race, gender, and class that shape them. To this end, we will learn about the history of eugenics and sterilization; the afterlife of slavery and racist (anti-Asian) U.S. immigration policy; settler colonialism and the Native American reservation system; state policing of family and kinship structures; developments in reproductive and gender-affirming biotechnology; and the thorny politics of sex work. At the same time, we will be equally interested in the ways that activists, theorists, and other cultural producers have pushed against oppressive policies and structures to imagine and fight for reproductive justice and liberation at the intersection of race, labor, and gender. We spend time, for example, with Black and Native feminists, Marxist social reproduction theorists, family abolitionists, and sex worker’s rights activists. Readings and viewings may include: Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tillie Olsen, Gayl Jones, Fae Myenne Ng, Louise Erdrich, Lizzie Borden, Barbara Loden, Amy Heckerling, and the International Wages for Housework Campaign.