As a scholar, I work at the intersections of literary studies, environmental studies, and American studies, bringing literary methods and objects into dynamic conversation with broader questions of social and environmental justice.
My book in progress, "Genre Frictions: Structural Violence, Activist Forms, and American Literature," explores how structural understandings of violence that began to emerge in the 1960s shaped both American fiction and American social movements from the 1970s to the present. In four chapters, I trace the development of a formal feature that I call “genre friction”—the politically productive tension that emerges when texts shift between realistic and speculative genres—and show how genre experimentation often responds to the same social issues and representational pressures as contemporaneous activism. Drawing on theories of genre’s world-structuring dimensions, I formulate three political functions of genre friction: defamiliarization, or the representation of the familiar in alienating and provocative ways; cognitive mapping, or the mediation of complex systems in relation to the individual; and prefiguration, or the imagination of desirable alternatives. In chapters that take up speculative fiction, magical realism, apocalypse, and the gothic, I show how these political functions allow literature to reckon with militarism and ecocide, exposure and environmental risk, climate justice, and infrastructural violence. Genre friction, I argue, is thus not only a defining feature of contemporary fiction, but also a powerful strategy for integrating the difficult knowledge of slow, structural, and environmental harm into everyday life. Some of the novelists whose work I engage across this project include Octavia Butler, Ana Castillo, Junot Díaz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruth Ozeki, Leslie Marmon Silko, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead. An article drawn from the final chapter from this project, tracing the afterlife of the plantation in petrochemical and carceral infrastructure in the U.S. South and the treatment of these post-plantation legacies in gothic fiction by Black writers, was published in American Literature in fall 2021, and an essay drawn from the second chapter of the project, addressing the 1982 protests in Warren County, NC that are often identified as the beginning of the Environmental Justice Movement, is forthcoming in American Quarterly.
Beyond this book project, my work at the intersections of contemporary literature, SF, and environmental humanities (under Rebecca Evans as well as Rebecca Ballard) has appeared in ISLE (co-authored with undergraduate collaborators), ASAP/Journal, Science Fiction Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, An Ecotopian Lexicon (Minnesota UP), This Is Not a Science Fiction Textbook (Goldsmiths, co-authored with undergraduate collaborators), and Women's Studies Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The Anthropocene and Literature (Cambridge UP). I am one of the hosts of the podcast Novel Dialogue, for which I also interviewed Ruth Ozeki in 2022, have written for the Science Fiction section of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and have contributed review essays to American Literature and Public Books. As part of the Triangle Editorial Collective, I also served as one of the editors of The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science (2020).