I received my Ph.D. in English from Harvard University in November 2023. My research focuses on modern 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 literary history of idleness

My dissertation, “The Art of Idleness in Modern Literature,” argues that literature, from the late nineteenth century forward, takes on an important but often unnoticed cultural role: as a counter-voice against the pressures of work. The writers I study ascribe a new importance to states of passivity, repose, daydream, and other forms of nonproductive absorption, suggesting that it is here, outside the bounds of work, where imagination and contemplation can survive in the modern world.

In many of the literary works I consider—from Émile Zola’s novels of naturalism to the modernism of Bloomsbury and the Harlem Renaissance to the homoerotic aestheticism of Alan Hollinghurst—a decadent embrace of idleness and beauty supports a political critique of the centrality of work. These texts imagine how leisure can be more democratically distributed across the population.

My case studies illustrate a range of hopes, or fantasies, about the possibilities of leisure. Idleness is imagined as a luxurious escape from the miseries of labor (Zola and other naturalist writers), as a pacifistic immersion in the pleasures of conversation and art, allowing for aesthetic, erotic, and economic experimentalism (the Bloomsbury Group), as a prerequisite for the freedom of movement and political participation long denied to black Americans (Vincent O. Carter, William Gardner Smith, and other black flaneur narratives), and as an arena of total aesthetic and erotic surrender (Hollinghurst). In each case, idleness and aesthetic experience are represented as mutually augmenting. And in each case, idleness is revealed to have reformist tendencies, expressing a yearning for an enlarged field of experience, and linked explicitly, in several of the works I examine, to projects of political change.

My dissertation traces an alliance between literature and idleness, arguing that the intensification and remaking of leisure is a key part of literature’s cultural work.

Other scholarly projects

A special issue of Studies in American Jewish Literature on the essays of Cynthia Ozick (co-edited with Michèle Mendelssohn) was published in March 2024 and can be accessed here.

My next major academic project examines how politics and culture have become more “theatricalized” even while theater as an art form recedes from centrality. Tracing the dispersal of theatrical conventions into various media and art forms, and showing how modern and contemporary artists in a range of genres have imagined the theater as a ground for epistemological, erotic, and political conflict, the project takes a fresh look at the antitheatrical tradition. An essay in The Yale Review on the theatrical elements of public shaming is an early start at addressing these questions about theatricality, power, and charisma. An article from this project, on Nick Drnaso’s graphic novel Acting Class, is in its early stages of preparation.

Teaching and mentorship

I am a prize-winning teacher and mentor. At Harvard, I have taught (as sole instructor) courses on tragic drama, the queer coming-of-age novel, and the writings of J. M. Coetzee. I also advised six senior theses on a range of subjects, from Keats’s medical career to literature’s prefiguring of virtual-reality technology.

From 2017-2020, I was a resident tutor in Lowell House, where I sang in an amateur opera, rowed on the Charles River, advised students on their fellowship applications, and chatted with hundreds of students over meals in the dining hall.

For my CV, click here.