About

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. My primary research areas are American literature and the environmental humanities.

In my book project, “Log Cabin Ecologies: Matter, Race, and Domestic Environments in American Literature,” I employ material ecocriticism to read the storied matter of the nineteenth-century log cabin in American literature by Black, Indigenous, and white settler authors. By attending to the matter of the log cabin and the nonhuman nature that surrounds it and enters it, I show the ambivalence of the log cabin in both aiding and resisting the goals of slavery and settler colonialism. Despite this ambivalence, I argue that the log cabin’s stories open space for possibilities of environmental justice, Land Back, relationship to place, and an abolition ecology that works to dismantle the settler-colonial and racial capitalist logics that disrupt human relationships to nonhuman nature. Work from this project is forthcoming from Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture. I am also at work on a collection of essays about pregnancy, parenting, and climate change.

I hold a PhD in English from the University of Colorado Boulder, as well as graduate certificates in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Digital Humanities, and College Teaching; my work is also informed by my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in interdisciplinary environmental studies. I have participated in the Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference, the LA Review of Books Publishing Workshop, and a fiction writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center. For ten years, I served as managing and prose editor of the environmental literary magazine The Hopper, and I am currently managing editor of ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment.