I write and teach courses on American literature in the hope of building a just and vibrant future.

Born

Princeton, WV

hometown

Ellsworth, PA

current Residence

Saint Louis, MO

I’m an assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University, with core specialties in modern and contemporary American literature, Latinx and Indigenous studies, and the environmental humanities, particularly environmental justice.

I hold a PhD in English from Princeton University, where my work was awarded the Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s top graduate prize in the humanities. Prior to my PhD, I earned an MFA at the University of Mississippi as a John and Renee Grisham Fellow. Following it, I completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mahindra Center at Harvard University.

I’m currently at work on my first academic monograph, Company Town Archipelago: Art, Environment, and American Corporate Empire. The project’s five chapters analyze how contemporary writers and artists are looking to the complex legacies of company towns to animate possibilities of dissent and hope from deep within the Anthropocene.

My writing has appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, American Literature, The Georgia Review, Transatlantica, and elsewhere. I’m the coeditor of two volumes of scholarly essays: Cli-Fi and Class: Socioeconomic Justice in Contemporary American Climate Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2023) and Teaching Energy Humanities (MLA Press, in progress). I have been a resident artist at the Blue Mountain Center and a maintenance assistant at the largest underground coal mine in the United States.