About

I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. My research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century US, Black, and ethnic literatures and critical race and ethnic studies.

As a literary and cultural studies scholar, I am broadly interested in the violence of racial capitalism in US literature and culture. My work primarily deals with how violence arises out of and impacts capitalist social relations and ideological production, especially as it relates to notions of selfhood, ownership, and state power across the long nineteenth century.

Right now, I’m at work on my book project, At All Costs: Extralegal Violence and Liberal Democracy in US Culture, which examines extralegal violence not as a lawless force that threatened US liberal-democratic governance but instead as emerging from and further entrenching the conditions that governance set.