My research explores the relationship between global modernisms, dialectical thought, and critical social theory. My dissertation, Twilight of the Idle: Unemployment and the Crisis of Modern Representation, argues that systemic unemployment since the nineteenth century has undermined available modes of social self-representation, producing crises not only in political economy but in aesthetic and philosophical representations of society more broadly. Working across literary and visual modernismsāfrom Alice Neelās portraiture to the novels of Claude McKay, William Faulkner, and Ćdouard GlissantāI show how this representational crisis of unemployment manifests as a constitutive formal dilemma in āweak,ā late, and peripheral modernisms. The project thus offers a new way of articulating the genealogy of dialectical thought and modern representation from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as well as a new framework whereby a number of contemporary academic discourses and disciplines (Ethnic Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies, philosophy and sociology, art history and narrative theory) might be brought into renewed dialogue.
I hold a BA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. At Berkeley, I am supported by a Mellon-Berkeley Fellowship, and I am completing a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.
Selected Publications:
āValue Dissociation and Racial Form.ā Coauthored with Naima Karczmar. Value andĀ Difference, eds. Amy DeāAth and Brian Whitener. [Forthcoming]
āPersistence in Noncontradiction.ā Review of Paul Stasiās The Persistence of Realism in Modernist Fiction ¾±²ŌĢżComparative Literature and Culture. [Forthcoming]
āThe Surplus Epic: Global Unemployment and the Anachronism of National Allegory.ā Comparative Literature and Culture. [Forthcoming]
āThe Concept of the Lumpenproletariat: Toward a Categorial Derivation andĀ ¶Ł¾±²õ²¹²µ²µ°ł±š²µ²¹³Ł¾±“Ē²Ō.ā Kontradikce / Contradictions. [Forthcoming]
āThe Necessary Fetish.ā Review of Beverly Bestās The Automatic Fetish in Philosophy,Ā Politics and Critique. [Forthcoming]
ā.ā Marxist Institute for Research.
ā.ā Journal of Foreign Language and Cultures,Ģż2021.Ģż
āJoyce Saint James: Perpetual Pilgrimage in Ulysses.ā Columbia Journal of LiteraryĀ Criticism,Ģż2019.
Selected Presentations & Lectures:
āFaulknerās Clitoris: Underdevelopment, Ontogenesis, and Other Southern Questions.ā Invited speaker for Global Modernisms Symposium, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2026.
".ā Invited speaker with Amy DeāAth, Chris OāKane, Chris Nealon, and Naima Karczmar for the Red MayĀ public lecture series, 2026.
āā Moderator and respondent for public seminar series, with invited speakers Jake Orbison, James Crane, and Chris OāKane, 2026.
āFictionality contra Allegory.ā Paper presented at āJameson, Allegory, and the Work of Art,ā ACLA, 2026.
āB“Ē²Ō²¹±č²¹°ł³Ł¾±²õ³¾ en face.ā Paper presented at Institute for Languages and Cultures,Ā 2025.
āFutile Singulars: Alice Neelās Monadology of Wageless Life.ā Lecture deliveredĀ for Berkeley-Stanford Lecture Series, Stanford University, with respondent Prof.Ā Blakey Vermeule, 2025.
āāThe Housekeeping of Spiritā: The Crisis of Carework in the Dialectical Tradition.āĀ Paper presented at āHegel and World Literature,ā ACLA, 2025.
āJameson Contra Sociology.ā Paper presented at āAnalytics of Value,ā 91¶¶Ņõ Santa Cruz,Ā 2025.
āThe Problem Romance of Black Marxism.ā Paper presented at Institute for LanguagesĀ and Cultures,Ā 2024.
āNegative Dialectics and Lumpenization.ā Paper presented at āThe Future of theĀ Lumpenproletariat," 91¶¶Ņõ Santa Barbara,Ā 2024.
āChoosing a Fetish with Banjo.ā Paper presented at āThe Rhetoric of Value,ā ACLA,Ā 2024.
"Black Powerās Free Improvisation and its Afterimage in Tongo Eisen-Martin." PaperĀ presented at "Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir," ACLA,Ā 2023.
āContinuities of Racial Fascism: āThe Pisan Cantosā as Elegy for Louis Till.ā PaperĀ presented at āAvant-Gardes @ Zero Hour,ā cosponsored by Wayne State University, Hunan Normal University, and Statement ³¾²¹²µ²¹³ś¾±²Ō±š,Ģż2021.
āFinnegans Wake 24/7: Dreams and the Self-Negativity of Labor.ā Paper presented atĀ Laboratoire Junior OVALE at Sorbonne UniversitĆ©, 2020.
