I am a scholar of literature and theory, and my research on European modernism focuses on the relationship between scientific discourses, their cultural expressions, and literary representation. Inspired by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, my work tracks concepts—energy, rhythm, shock, and economy, for example—across their syntagmatic and paradigmatic networks, examining their aesthetic, cultural, scientific, semantic, and philosophical valences in order to chart out the logics that undergird modernity. Within literary works, I am specifically interested in the phenomenon of linguistic failure, experiences of negativity, suspension, or dissolution, and how these textual moments challenge and refigure conceptions of language and literarity. 

My dissertation project, "Language Worked Over: Thermodynamic Modernism and the Poetics of Exhaustion," traces the aesthetic legacies of the thermodynamic sciences in modernist writing through the figuration, formalization, and inscription of exhaustion. Through readings of several canonical modernist writers—Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Paul Celan—this dissertation examines how writers in the late-19th and early-20th centuries incorporated the laws of thermodynamics, which describe the conservation and degradation of energy, into their aesthetic practices and theories. I contend that, in doing so, modernist authors participated in the discourses of exhaustion that proliferated during the period due to the cultural dissemination of thermodynamics. Rather than uncritically duplicating popular industrial capitalist theories of exhaustion as a cultural menace, however, the writers examined in this project refigured exhaustion as the proper telos of aesthetic experience. By examining the relation between scientific thought and literary production, I argue for a reappraisal of literary modernism that posits the movement as inextricably bound up with thermodynamic logics that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, countering dominant interpretations of modernism as paralleling or prefiguring relativity and quantum theory. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical sources—continental philosophy, experimental linguistics, sociology, economics, and the philosophy of science—and close readings, my dissertation seeks not to discern how language works, but how it works on us, exhausts us, and the ethico-political implications that come with the fatigue of the speaking subject. 

My writing has been featured or is forthcoming in the Journal of Modern Literature, Poetics Today, Postmodern Culture, German Quarterly, and Chicago Review.