CV

Education

  • Ph.D., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, English (expected May 2020)
  • B.A., The University of Texas at Austin, Plan II Honors (Highest Honors) and English Honors (Highest Honors), 2013

Dissertation:“A Glamorous Nightmare: Race, AIDS, and the Biopolitics of American Literary Study” examines, through a range of literary and dramatic texts, how the HIV/AIDS has been configured as a symbolic resource on behalf of white exceptionalism between the 1980s and the present day. 

Committee:Matthew Taylor (co-director), Priscilla Wald (co-director; Duke), David Eng (U Penn), Florence Dore, GerShun Avilez (U Maryland).

Selected Awards and Fellowships

  • W.M. Keck Fellowship, The Huntington Library, Pasadena CA, 2019
  • Marcie Cohen Ferris Research Fellowship, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, 2019
  • Graduate Student Research Award, Program in Sexuality Studies, UNC, 2019
  • Conference Travel Grant, American Comparative Literature Association, 2019
  • Transportation Grant, The Graduate School, UNC, 2019
  • Summer Research Fellowship, Department of English, UNC, 2019
  • Transportation Grant, The Graduate School, UNC, 2019
  • Summer Research Grant, Provost’s Committee on LGBTQ Life, UNC, 2018
  • Summer Research Grant, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, 2018
  • Student Undergraduate Teaching Award (6 awarded across the university), UNC, 2017
  • Graduate Student Research Award, Program in Sexuality Studies, UNC, 2017
  • Summer Research Grant, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, 2016
  • Ruth Rose Richardson Award for Outstanding Record in the First Year of Graduate Study (highest GPA in cohort), Department of English, UNC, 2015
  • Summer Research Grant, Carolina Center for Jewish Studies, 2015
  • Mellon Graduate Fellowship, UNC, 2014 – 19
  • Dean’s Distinguished Graduate, College of Liberal Arts (12 students chosen from 2,983 graduates), The University of Texas at Austin, 2013
  • Phi Beta Kappa, The University of Texas at Austin, 2012

Publications

Journal Articles

  • “Immunity’s Racial Empire: Virality, Melancholy, Whiteness,” American Literature (revised and resubmitted)
  • “Speaking Fees: Capital, Colony, and Reference in China Mieville’s Embassytown.” LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory31.1 (forthcoming 2020) 
  • “‘A hint of industrial espionage in the eye’: Orientalism, Essayism, and the Politics of Memory in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video36.1 (2019): 42 – 61.
  • “Long Live the Old Flesh: AIDS and the Americans with Disabilities Act at Quarter Century.” symplokē26.1-2 (December 2018): 251 – 266.

Reviews   

  • “Deregulating Grief: A Review of Dagmawi Woubshet’s The Calendar of Loss: Race, Sexuality and Mourning in the Early Era of AIDS,” boundary 2, 2016 (Web.)

Other Publications

  • “Another LA Lovesong: A Review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice,” Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, 2015. (Web.)

Podcasts

  • “Deep Time, Decline, and Nostalgia: A Conversation on Time with Jonathan Sachs and 

Noah Herringman (Co-hosted with Ben Murphy.) Interview forETHOS: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics, 2015. (Web.)

Invited Talks

  • “‘All the new information in my blood’: Immunity, Melancholy, Virality,” Health and Humanities Lab, UNC, 2019
  • “AIDS and the Americans with Disabilities Act at Quarter Century,” Bullitt History of Medicine Lecture Series, School of Medicine, UNC, 2017
  • “Foucault Must Be Defended? Race, AIDS, and the Origins of Homonationalism,” LGBT Student Center Speaker Series, UNC, 2017

Conferences

Conferences Organized

  • Post-45 Graduate Colloquium, February 2016, UNC

Panels Organized

  • “Fighting as we Build? Race, Resistance, and Psychoanalysis” (with David Seitz), American Studies Association Annual Convention, Honolulu, HI
  • “Coloring Queer Theory, Queering Critical Race Studies” (with GerShun Avilez), Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP) Annual Conference, Oakland, CA, 2017

Papers Presented

  • “‘All the new information in my blood’: Immunity, Melancholy, Virality,” Modern Language Association Convention, Seattle, WA, 2020
  • “Immunity’s Racial Empire: Virality, Melancholy, Whiteness,” American Studies Association Convention, Honolulu, HI, 2019
  • “‘All the new information in my blood’: Immunity, Melancholy, Virality,” Post-45 Graduate Symposium, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 2019
  • “Angels and AIDS: A Racial Fantasia on Viral Themes,” American Comparative Literature Association Annual Conference, Washington, DC, 2019
  • “‘A necessarily impossible object’: Race, AIDS, and the Origins of Neoliberalism.” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Johns Hopkins University, 2017
  • “Foucault Must Be Defended?” Transnational Imperialisms, King’s College, London, 2017
  • “Exceptional Deviance: On the Racial Politics of Homosexuality in Less than Zeroand American Psycho).” Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP)Annual Conference, Oakland, CA, 2017
  • “The New Criticism’s Jewish Question: Finance and Fecundity in Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave.” Post-45 Graduate Symposium, UNC, 2016
  • “AIDS in the Great Society: Prosthesis, Containment, and Neoliberal Disability in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Lyndon.’” American Comparative Literature AssociationAnnual Conference, Seattle, WA, 2015
  • “Julius Shulman Reconsidered: Jewish Labor, Popular Aesthetics, and the Politics of the Mid-Century Modern Home.” Thinking Beyond The Canon: New Themes and Approaches in Jewish Studies, UCLA, 2015

Teaching 

Instructor of Record

  • English 147: Mystery Fiction, 35 Students                                                       Fall 2019
  • English 105: Composition and Rhetoric, 17 Students                                      Spring 2018
  • English 105: Composition and Rhetoric, 19 Students                                      Spring 2017
  • English 105: Composition and Rhetoric, 19 Students                                      Fall 2016
  • English 105: Composition and Rhetoric, 19 Students                                      Spring 2016
  • English 105: Composition and Rhetoric, 19 Students                                      Fall 2015

Teaching Assistant

  • English 142: Film Analysis, 28 Students                                                                       Fall 2017

Graduate Research Consultant (including guest lectures)

  • English 261: Literary Criticism, 21 Students                                                    Fall 2019
  • Cmp. Lit. 143: Visual Culture, 16 Students                                                     Spring 2018
  • English 147: Mystery Fiction, 33 Students                                                       Spring 2017
  • English 147: Mystery Fiction, 28 Students                                                       Spring 2016

Service to University and Field

  • Nominee to the MLA Delegate Assembly, Race and Ethnicity, 2020 – 23
  • Founding Member and Steering Committee, Post-45 Graduate Collective, 2017 –
  • Conference Assistant, Novel Sounds: American Fiction in the Age of Rock and Roll, National Humanities Center, 2016
  • Editor (Nonfiction), The Carolina Quarterly, 2014 – 2019

Professional Affiliations

  • American Studies Association (ASA), 2019 – 
  • Association for the Study of Arts of the Present (ASAP), 2017 – 
  • Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), 2016 –
  • Modern Language Association (MLA), 2014 – 
  • American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), 2014 – 

Teaching and Research Interests

  • American literature 1945 to present
  • African American literature
  • Mystery fiction
  • Film
  • Critical and literary theory
  • Queer theory and sexuality studies
  • Critical race theory
  • Rhetoric and composition

Languages

  • French: Reading (fluent), Writing (proficient), Speaking (proficient)

References

  • Matthew Taylor (Associate Professor of English, UNC): mattheta@email.unc.edu
  • Priscilla Wald (R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English, Duke): pwald@duke.edu
  • Florence Dore (Professor of English and Director of Graduate Study, UNC): fdore@unc.edu
  • David Eng (Richard L. Fisher Professor of English, U Penn): deng@english.upenn.edu
  • GerShun Avilez (Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland): avilez@umd.edu