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
Outside, I enjoy strolling with my dog, running along the lakeshore, and visiting state parks. Inside, I enjoy visiting the Garfield Park Conservatory and tinkering with house plants (even as they take over my apartment). When I can, I take advantage of the many excellent music and food venues around Chicago. Before moving here, I was a lawyer in Australia. I have a Ph.D. in English, with a dissertation examining how a set of early 20th century literary texts reimagine diplomacy in ways departing from its officially mandated form as an emanation of state reason - via ethics, publics, and economics. My research and teaching interests are in global Anglophone literature, postcolonial studies, the Bildungsroman, recessive action, rights and citizenship, race, and gender and sexuality.
Current/Upcoming Courses:
The Lives of Others (Autumn 2024)
How much can you ever really know someone else? In this course, we take up the inscrutability of others through a range of narratives about - politically, socially, and geographically - distant others from the early 20th century. Texts include fiction, documentary film, and critical theory around transnationalism, contact zones and ethnography). Some of these texts meditate on the general problem of living with others. Others take on the limits of empathy, access, and friendship whether explicitly or in their formal arrangement. Specifically, we focus on works that engage with an ethics or “work on the self” as a preliminary to having knowledge of others. We will be guided by primary readings that likely include Claude Levi-Strauss, Kazuo Ishiguro, Werner Herzog, Maggie Nelson, Amitav Ghosh, and J.M. Coetzee.
Postcolonial Openings (Winter 2025)
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).