A third-year graduate student in Berkeley's doctoral program in English (designated emphases in STS and Critical Theory), my scholarship addresses how scientific practices andcultures have influenced literary criticism since its emergence as an academic discipline. I focus on modernist poetry and on the rhetoric of objectivity in a variety of turn-of-the-century discourses—in particular, aesthetics, cognitive science, computer science, philosophy of mind, ethnoracial politics and academic disciplinary formation. In addition to teaching courses on American and British literature and film, cultural politics and intellectual history at Berkeley, I am a member of the Berkeley Social Ontology Group, a participant in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar on "Speciesism and the Future of Humanity," an editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Qui Parle, and a former co-director of the Transnational and Ethnic American Studies Working Group. I am currently serving a three-year term as a member of the Delegate Assembly of the Modern Language Association.

Publications, Research, & Conference Papers

Mellon-Sawyer Seminar 2012-13: “Speciesism and the Future of Humanity: Biology, Culture, Sociopolitics.” Participant. 

“Modernizing Modernism: Intentionality, Neuroscience and the Sense of Modernist Poetry.” Modern Language Association Conference, Boston. 3 Jan 2013.

Big Ideas Course Development: “Sense and Sensibility and Science.” Graduate student researcher under the supervision of John Campbell (Philoosphy), Robert MacCoun (Public Policy) and Saul Perlmutter (Physics). Fall 2012. 

“The Neuroscience of Reading: An fMRI Study of Literary Attention,” a Stanford Humanities Institute and Center for Neurobiological Imaging (Stanford) venture. Participant. (http://m.npr.org/news/Science/162401053). Aug 2012. 

“Somaesthetics, Sensation and the Science of Form: A Poetics of Intentionality.” Presented to the Berkeley Social Ontology Group, with John Searle responding. April 2012. 

“The Vocal Body,” Adriana Cavarero, Qui Parle, 20.2 (Spring/Summer 2012). Translation from the Italian of an entry in Dictionnaire du corps, ed. Michela Marzano, Puf. Paris 2007. 983-988.

“’To Strengthen and Knit the Oppressed’?: Politics, Pluralism and Posthumanism in The Grapes of Wrath”. Submitted for publication. 2012.