I received my Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in November 2023. My dissertation won the Le Baron Russell Briggs Prize for the best dissertation in 20th-century British and Anglophone literature at Harvard.

My research focuses on 19th and 20th century British literature, aesthetics, and intersections between literature and political economy. I try to use literature as a window into parts of life (e.g. aesthetic and affective experience) that are difficult to study through other disciplines. I have also worked collaboratively with colleagues in History of Science on the topic of disinformation.

I hold an M.Sc. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from Oxford, where I studied on a Rhodes scholarship. I earned my B.A. in Political & Social Thought from the University of Virginia.

The Art of Idleness

The Art of Idleness: The Questioning of Work in Modern Literature (under contract with Harvard University Press) seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the world of work by renewing attention to the problem of “idleness,” the stylized withdrawal from labor—a stance that many important writers in the modern era have found salient or even embraced. From the late nineteenth century forward, literature increasingly takes up the task of questioning work, valorizing idleness, and imagining forms of life detached from, or resistant to, the demands of productivity. This rehabilitation of idleness occurs not just in, say, the decadent and aestheticist writings of the 1890s, where we might expect to find it, but more widely, across a range of important literary movements, and often in texts that aspire toward ambitious or comprehensive visions of modernity. From Émile Zola’s novels of naturalism to the modernism of the Harlem Renaissance and the Bloomsbury Group to the homoerotic aestheticism of Alan Hollinghurst, a sensuous embrace of idleness and beauty supports a political critique of the centrality of labor. These texts imagine—and enact via aesthetic form—how “free time” might be distributed more democratically across the population.

Literature asks us to think and dream, sometimes for hours on end. The tension between this lavishly time-intensive art form and the speed and pressure of modern economies is often noted. Less often examined is how writers have responded to that tension by linking idleness with metaphysical and aesthetic goods. The Art of Idleness traces an alliance between leisure and literary form, arguing that literature serves as an essential bulwark against the dominance of labor in modern life.