I am an assistant professor of English at Mount Marty University. I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri in 2020, where I wrote a dissertation about formal innovation by contemporary novelists representing post-2008 protest movements.

My scholarship examines theories of the novel, environmental humanities, and social movements to explore how activists are struggling against ongoing climate catastrophe and how such struggle gets represented in novels. I’m currently working on a book about the post-70s US deindustrializing economy, environmental protests, and the rise of genre fiction. The book examines the intersection of the three topics and follows US fiction’s trajectory from a realist representation of the onset of deindustrialization in the 60s and 70s to more informal genres like horror in the 2010s. I propose the “genre turn” as the representative strategy of circulation and service that parallels the US economy’s turn from production and explores how those sites of circulation and service are the inflection point in environmental protests.

I also teach literature and writing courses through environmental and digital humanities frameworks. I have taught contemporary US novels, contemporary Anglophone novels, regional US literature, literature surveys, first-year writing, professional writing, and continuing writing courses through what I call “infrastructure pedagogy,” or attention to how physical and digital structures guide our attention. In literature classes this can mean practicing close-reading and mapping representations of energy infrastructures or resource extraction. In writing classes, this can mean critically attending to the technologies of writing.

Before teaching at the University of Tennessee, I taught at Emory University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Missouri, Moberly Area Community College, and California State University-Fullerton. I have worked in professional writing program development and assessment, writing program administration, and writing center administration.