I am Lecturer (Maître Assistant) in American literature and culture in the English Department at the University of Lausanne. Previously, I was an affiliated faculty member at Emerson College in Boston. My research and teaching focus on the literature and culture of the United States from the late 18th century to the present day, with a particular interest in contemporary problems of democracy, equality, and freedom. I work in a range of disciplines, including literary theory, visual culture and film, Black studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, Marxism, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Within the context of these broader fields, I am especially concerned with the relation between art and politics; questions of genre and form; the realist tradition; modernism and postmodernism; histories of anarchy and revolt; and how both individuals and communities are shaped by formations of gender, sex, race, and class.
My first book, Democratic Anarchy: Aesthetics and Political Resistance in U.S. Literature, develops out of these interests and engages the anxious intersections of politics and aesthetics to offer a new theory of democratic equality in twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture. This project and related research have led to published reviews, a translation, and articles in journals such as Journal of Modern Literature, Diacritics, American Literature, African American Review, and Critical Inquiry.
