About
I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows and Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College, where I am also affiliated with the Comparative Slavery Studies group. My research and teaching focus broadly on Black literature in the Americas and the comparative history of Atlantic slavery. I’m also interested in translation studies, philosophy of history, and queer studies. My scholarly writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Journal of Social History, Journal of American Studies, MELUS, and Winterthur Portfolio, with additional essays in the Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography (Oxford UP) and Cambridge Companion to Richard Wright (2019). My public-facing writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Transition: Magazine of Africa and the Diaspora, ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America, Public Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books. I’m also a co-editor, along with Wai Chee Dimock et al., of American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (Columbia UP, 2017).
My first book project, The Event of Witness: Slave Testimony and Social Practice, charts an alternative cartography of enslaved testimonial expression. Studies of the Anglo-American slave narrative tradition, as well as theories of testimony derived from psychoanalysis and trauma theory, overwhelmingly privilege autobiographical accounts that describe traumatic experience through recollective narration. The Event of Witness investigates Afro-Atlantic testimonial forms that diverge from these established norms. By centering hemispheric, multilingual archives of slave testimony that do not render past “experience,” The Event of Witness draws on feminist and queer theory to reveal how enslaved mystics, correspondents, poets, and storytellers, among others, produced testimony as a mode of mutual witness. The book thus frames slave testimony not as a site of memory but as a worldmaking practice—a way of imagining and enacting forms of social life beyond those imposed by regimes of enslavement and their afterlives.
I received my Ph.D. in English, with a secondary field in African and African American Studies, from Harvard University in 2019. In the English Department, I served as Lead Coordinator for Graduate Colloquia and founder/co-coordinator of the Race & Ethnicity Graduate Colloquium. I was also an affiliate of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and a member of the Tutorial Board in the Department of Comparative Literature.
