​I'm a literary scholar specializing in the 20th c and contemporary British and Anglophone novel, Environmental Humanities, particularly the intersections of biodiversity loss and the cultural productions of everyday life, archives of extinction, critical theory 20th into 21st centuries, fictions of migration and displacement, and new directions in literature and ethics.

My research asks how fiction and attendant cultural materials can help us comprehend and address urgent global challenges. My first book project explores how 20th c. novels and novelistic works radically reimagine relations between human and the nonhuman world through micro-scale phenomena. My second book-length project seeks to show how processes of biodiversity loss are enmeshed in the cultural products of modernity and colonial and imperial histories.

​I am currently a Research Specialist in Environmental Humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia working on two trans-disciplinary EH Labs that bring together faculty in humanities and applied sciences: Coastal Conservatory and Sanctuary Lab. I am Affiliate Faculty at the Global Policy Center at the Frank Batten School of Public Policy and a Visiting Scholar in the English Department. Through the Humanitarian Collaborative at the Global Policy Center, I lead a multi-year research project investigating the uses of fiction to increase public support for migrants and displaced persons for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs' public advocacy programs. 

I received my PhD in English from NYU and my BA (Hons) is from the University of Chicago.