I am a PhD candidate in English at University of Colorado Boulder, on Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute lands, where I study American literature, environmental humanities, and digital humanities.
In my dissertation, I use a material ecocritcal lens to analyze the log cabin in nineteenth-century American literature, addressing human relationships to matter, nonhuman kin, place, and each other. As I excavate the log cabin’s complex histories of settlement, slavery, assimilation, and resistance, I reveal opportunities for repair, recovery, and resurgence to counter America’s darker and ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy. I show that the log cabin is a site where humans make contact with the nonhuman world and form stronger relationships to each other, a site where we can find inspiration for living sustainably and justly as we all strive to make home.
In the English department, I have taught environmental literature, American women’s literature, global women’s literature, the climate change novel, composition, and a graduate pedagogy seminar, and I served for two years as the department’s lead graduate teaching instructor. I am the recipient of the 2024-2025 George F. Reynolds Dissertation Fellowship from the Graduate School.