I specialize in 20th-century and contemporary American Literature, blue humanities, and cultural studies. Examining the human-nonhuman amalgamation in the works of Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler, and Jeff VanderMeer, my PhD thesis Jouissance of the Paranoiac Machine: Posthumanism and Futuristic Bodies deploys Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate that despite the rise of posthumanism, paranoiac sentiments about boundary dissolution are still prevalent in contemporary society. At the same time, my thesis utilizes oceanic aesthetics as an alternative to paranoia, seeking to promote an ecological understanding of the Lacanian topology. Prioritizing the function of nonhuman entities (such as the octopus, the whale, the chemical particles in the bodies of sea creatures, human bodies decomposed in the ocean in colonial history) as well as the notion of quantum entanglement and the Lacanian “extimacy,” my thesis interrogates the hierarchy between the land and the ocean, between the human and the nonhuman, in the formation of memory, subjectivity, aesthetics, and maritime history.
My current research project involves the revision and publication of my first chapter on oceanic aesthetics and environmental consciousness as well as finishing my novel manuscript Memories of a Voyager in the West.