Profile
I am a literary and media theorist working at the intersections of sound studies, narrative, film, performance, American and British modernism, psychoanalysis, race, and the postcolonial, asking what practices and philosophies of listening can tell us about aesthetic forms. I am especially interested in sound reproduction, early sound cinema, and their entanglements with race, colonialism, and the nation. I am co-editor of The Faulkner Journal and a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies, and have served as an officer of The William Faulkner Society, The Joseph Conrad Society of America, and the New School’s chapter of the AAUP.
My first book, The Fact of Resonance (Fordham 2020), returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in “resonance” an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. It follows transformations in narrative acoustics through the resonances between the work of Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman. In 2021, the book was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association first book award.
I am currently working on two book projects. The first, “After Images,” is a study of witnessing in the age of broadcast and digital media, theorizing the ethics of mediating suffering and testimony through technology. The book focuses on the role of recitation, voice, and sound in the absence of photographed or recorded images, but also the sonic interplay of mediated images that testify to violence. I am also at work on a monograph on “correspondences,” or echoes in transatlantic modernism, thinking through the aesthetic and psychological means through which sounds recur across time space to form queer, interracial, and exilic bonds in the work of Henry James, Theodor Reik, H.D., Isaac Julien, and early sound cinema.
Having been Associate Director of The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project and a reporter for KALW’s Philosophy Talk, I have worked on various digital sound projects. In 2020, I produced an oral history of Henry Street Settlement in the time of COVID-19, which was recently acquired by the New York Public Library. I am a practicing musician and released a solo LP with Silver Current Records, titled Only the Void Stands Between Us. In December 2024, it was Bandcamp’s Album of the Day.
Research and teaching fields
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Sound studies
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Digital humanities
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20th-century American literature and media culture
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20th-century British literature
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Transatlantic modernism
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Film history and theory
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Narrative theory and the novel
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Psychoanalysis and theories of the subject
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Postcolonial theory
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Black studies
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Gender and sexuality
Degrees Held
B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies, Hampshire College
M.A., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Professional Affiliation
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Joseph Conrad Society of America (Trustee)
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William Faulkner Society (Officer-at-large)
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Modern Language Association
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Society for the Study of Narrative
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Society for Cinema and Media Studies
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American Comparative Literature Association
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Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, Yale University
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Digital Yoknapatawpha
Recent Publications
“Queer Overtones: The Case of Eisenstein, Faulkner, and the POOL Group,” forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Modernisms, edited by Hannah Freed-Thall and Juno Richards
“Music from a Farther Room: A Genealogy of Ambience between Henry James and Theodor Reik,” forthcoming in Music, Sound, and Global Modernism (Oxford UP), edited by Sherry Lee and Daniel Grimley
“Hello Stranger: Ellipsis and Song in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32 (2): June 2023, 10-14
“Between Sound and Image: The Otherworldliness of Bessie Smith,” dossier eds. B. Ruby Rich and Michael B. Gillespie, Film Quarterly 76 (3): spring 2023, 48-54.
“The Future Anterior Witness: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death,” special issue on photography and film as visual evidence, ed. Paul Kottman, Social Research 89 (4): winter 2022, 1025-1050
“Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in The Wooster Group’s The B-Side: ‘Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons’ A Record Album Interpretation,” Performance Matters 8: 1 (2021), 54-72
The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham University Press, 2020)
“Outside In: Chorus and Clearing in the Time of Pandemic and Protest,” Sociologica 14:2 (2020), 1-14
“Music’s Unseen Body: Conrad, Cowell, Du Bois, and the Beginnings of American Experimental Music,” Conradiana 48: 2-3 (2020), 143-162.
Awards And Honors
Conradiana Best Essay Prize, 2020 (for “Music’s Unseen Body”)Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Price Lab for Digital
Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, 2018-2020
Mellon Fellow in the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, 2014-2015
The Joseph Conrad Society of America Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Prize, 2013 (For “A Sinister Resonance”)
Jacob K. Javits Fellow, 2001-2005
Woodrow Wilson Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 2000-2001