Staff and Faculty Directory

I began teaching at Booth in 2015 and completed a PhD in English Literature from the University of Toronto in 2019.

As a scholar, I work on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and culture, particularly the poetry of John Milton, but I teach courses in literary and cultural theory, media studies, contemporary literature and culture, and am generally concerned with theories of reading and interpretation, including recent debates around “critical” and “post-critical” styles of reading.

Those interests led to a series of articles considering how “mood” affects reading, suggesting, among other things, that thinking more clearly about our relationship to irony, tenderness, or stupidity can help us better understand how interpretation works. Those articles can be found in journals such as SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Philological Quarterly, and Milton Studies. I have also begun working on Milton’s reception history, looking at his huge but often neglected impact on eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and twentieth-century writers and theologians such as John Wesley and Charlotte Brontë.

Education for me is about desire—the desire to understand, to make sense of ourselves and our world, to figure out who we are and what we want from life. That’s why I try to ask “big” questions in my classes: What is a person? Do our lives have meaning? What is justice? What does it mean to call something beautiful or ugly? To me, the experience of really wondering, of sincerely pausing to consider the questions that we usually pass over in silence, not only helps us to cultivate an attitude of thoughtful reflection, but also encourages us to sit patiently with the sometimes unsettling experience of our own uncertainty.

One of the great pleasures of teaching is watching a diverse group of students become more confident about making their own value judgments. Whether we are talking about a text, a film, or some other more pressing issue in the world today, what usually begins to happen in my classes, as Bruce Robbins puts it, “is an experiment in political community building, a testing out of the terms on which we might or might not be able to agree with each other about how life is and how we ought to feel about it.” Not everyone agrees—in some ways, the more disagreements we have the better. But as we practice generosity, both with the texts and with each other, we usually begin to have real conversations: the kind where something genuine is at stake and where we all have something to contribute, but also, more excitingly, something to learn.