ABOUT ME

I work at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and the arts. I am interested in the varied and complex ways that literature takes up and speaks to philosophical questions, especially questions about personhood and human identity. My work explores how literature and art illuminate the world to us—that is, how they make a claim to knowledge, help us see and think, and offer us much more than fictions. My book, What We Are in Literature and Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), accordingly, is an experiment in philosophical criticism.

My intellectual interests and my courses focus on the relationship between literature and philosophy, aesthetics, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures, especially those in the Romantic, Modernist, and African American traditions. My published work focuses on literature and ethics; ordinary language philosophy; literature and everyday life; gender and sexuality; and philosophical approaches to literature, art, and film. I have recently published essays on Ludwig Wittgenstein (Cambridge Studies in Literature and Philosophy), Jane Austen (Modern Language Association’s Teaching World Literature), Emily Dickinson (Oxford Studies in Philosophy and Literature, The Norton Sampler, Back to the Lake), William Wordsworth (nonsite.org), and the concept of the everyday (Literature Compass). Some of my work in progress includes an article on the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, an essay titled “Women and the Struggle to Think,” and a larger project, “Arts of the Ordinary.”

I have an abiding interest in writers and the writing process, and teaching writing is at the center of my work in the classroom. I have advanced training in writing pedagogy from Johns Hopkins University and Florida Atlantic University, and I have taught small writing seminars at UC Berkeley, Rhode Island College, and Duke University. In my writing courses, I try to use the intellectual energy that students emanate and exude to motivate their growth as writers, and I try to push them to express their ideas with grace and courage.

I have been happily teaching for twenty years. I am a Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Before coming to Berkeley, I served on the faculty in the English departments at Rhode Island College, Boston University, and Florida Atlantic University. I was educated in two committedly interdisciplinary programs: the UC San Diego Literature Department (B.A., 1998) and the Program in Literature at Duke University (Ph.D., 2007). 

My interests expand every day. I try to grate against the requirement to specialize as responsibly as possible. Outside of the classroom, I love to garden and go to the movies.