I am jointly appointed in the departments of English and Comparative Literature and I am affiliated with the Asian American Research Center and the Critical Theory Program. My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, novel theory, 聽literature and philosophy,听affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked聽has also turned聽to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature, and cultural studies.
My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel聽("Thinking Literature" series, University of Chicago Press, 2020) turns to聽some聽experiments of modernist form - by Henry James, Marcel Proust, and, most centrally, Virginia Woolf - in order to reinvigorate our thinking about聽the聽ubiquitous but still under-theorized category of novelistic description. I have also written on topics including the role of atmospheres in everyday life, Roland Barthes's travels in China, and the role of the detail in fictions that withhold some piece of social information, such as a character's gender or race.
My editorial work includes a co-edited cluster on "setting" for Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and a聽new聽annotated edition of Woolf's聽A Room of One鈥檚 Own聽for the Norton Library, which appeared in 2026.
I am currently at work on a book project, "On Being a Type," that examines what it means to understand individuals 鈥� real and fictional 鈥� as representative of larger classes of persons.
Education
Ph.D., Comparative Literature,听Princeton University聽
B.A., Philosophy,听University of Toronto.
