I write and teach about the relationship between literature, technology, and inner life. My research has appeared or is forthcoming in PMLA, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction and the Journal of Modern Literature. In 2024, I received a PhD in English from Duke University, with a dissertation about contemporary fiction and commercial surveillance.
I'm currently revising and expanding this dissertation into a book about how data technologies have re-shaped the novel’s interest in private interiority. Everyone knows that targeted advertising, consumer profiling, and algorithmic recommendations have remade the world and reshaped our relationship to pleasure. My book, titled A Great Harvest: The Novel Self After Big Data, argues that novel theory can help us understand these transformations in subjectivity and social life. Bringing contemporary fiction by Rachel Cusk, Tao Lin, Tom McCarthy, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Natasha Stagg into a unique configuration with managerial handbooks, literary theory, and media theory, A Great Harvest will reveal the surprising affinities between the vernacular terms of computational life—creeping, cringing, doxing, and profiling—and the novel’s ways of seeing.
Courses: "Computing the Self: The Art and Philosophy of Digital Culture" (Spring '25); "Artificial Intelligence and Culture" (Fall '25).