As the child of working-class parents in Trenton, NJ, I was the first person in my immediate family to attend a four-year college. I received my Bachelor of Arts in English and Growth & Structure of Cities at Bryn Mawr College, where I also concentrated in Africana studies and creative writing. Researching queer African literature as a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow inspired me to pursue a career in the professoriate. Upon graduation, I was awarded the college's highest honor, the Gertrude Slaughter Fellowship for Academic Excellence. I also achieved First Place in the Kathryn Irene Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Competition, whose past recipients include Sylvia Plath and James Merrill.

After college, I worked on the sales force at Google Inc. in San Francisco, CA before returning to the East Coast for graduate school. I received my doctorate in English and Comparative Literature with a certificate from the Institute for Research on Women, Gender & Sexuality at Columbia University in 2018. I devoted my time at Columbia to transforming my research methodology and pedagogy through decolonial feminism. On that note, I was a Graduate Fellow for Women Mobilizing Memory, an innovative, transnational cross-collaboration of scholars, activists, and artists who feature cultural memory in their practices.

As a teacher of world literature, composition, and women's, gender and sexuality studies for undergraduates, I aimed to decolonize the literary canon throughout the college's Core Curriculum by highlighting underrepresented voices and promoting active, project-based learning. I also designed the Kaleidoscope Project, a diversity-based literacy program for underserved teens, as a Public Humanities Fellow, and I assisted teaching at a women's correctional facility through the Justice-in-Education Initiative. Thanks to my efforts, I became the only doctoral candidate in the history of the college to receive the Core Preceptor Award for Teaching Excellence twice and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching, the college's most prestigious honor for graduate students.

Influenced by all these experiences, my dissertation, "Arts of the Impossible: Violence, Trauma, and Erasure in the Global South," examines non-Western writers' strategies for reviving controversial materials from archives of state violence that have been repressed, manipulated, and distorted in dominant narratives of history. In each of the four human rights crimes I explore-- forced disappearance, transatlantic slavery, femicide, and genocide-- I articulate the radical narrative interventions and unorthodox hermeneutics that contemporary writers are inventing to counteract collective amnesia in world history. In my argument, experimental, imaginative writing that nevertheless maintains a high degree of social realism can defamiliarize readers' relationships to human rights and reframe the discursive norms by which we come to understand intersecting justice issues in the international public sphere. My particular case studies include: forced disappearances during the Sri Lankan civil war from the 1980s-early 2000s and Uruguay's military dictatorship in the 1970s-80s; the femicide crisis plaguing the U.S.-Mexico border since the early 1990s; a state-sanctioned slave massacre on board a slave ship called the Zong in 1781; and genocides ranging from the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide in 1994, and the Parsley Massacre in 1937. I engage these wide-ranging events through an equally wide variety of novels and poetry by diasporic writers, who include Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka/Canada), Cristina Peri Rossi (Uruguay/Spain), M. NourbeSe Philip (Tobago/Canada), Roberto Bolaño (Chile/Spain), Caryl Phillips (St. Kitts/UK), Edwidge Danticat (Haiti/US), and Boubacar Boris Diop (Senegal).

I am revising my dissertation into a book that focuses more narrowly on the role that the world novel in English plays in transforming the West's relationship to the human rights crimes I have mentioned. I am particularly invested in how English, as a colonial language imbued with racial privilege and social capital, contributes to a phenomenon that I have called "ontological erasure," which effaces the very capacity for being human from an ostensibly human body. Authoritarian regimes earmark specific dissident groups for dehumanization. Then, representatives of the state systematically reimagine these marginalized citizens as scapegoats for the nation-state's failures so that their rights-- and often, their very humanity-- is no longer defensible or even tenable in the public imagination. My work on intersections between ideology, human rights discourse, and the literary imagination is even more urgent in our era of globalization. With rhetorics of ultranationalism, white supremacy, and the Far Right becoming evermore commonplace-- and even desirable-- around the world, everyone must rethink historical links between political violence and identity to promote human rights for the future.

Recently, I was the 2018-19 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women at Brown University, where I will be teaching a seminar on Postcolonial Horror in Spring 2019. My current appointment is as the 2019-21 ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow at PEN America, a nonprofit that works at the intersections of human rights and the literary arts. As festival programs manager, I develop programming for our annual World Voices Festival and writing workshops serving undocumented youth and low-wage workers.