About Me
I am an Americanist literary, cultural, and media studies scholar and writer whose work interrogates racial and economic identity formation in the media, particularly in moments of social conflict. My work is broadly concerned with what it means to be representable in popular culture and the relationship between a mainstream public and a shifting margin which nevertheless maintains those boundaries.
Taking close reading and historicism as my primary methodologies, my research has taken me to archives across the country, spans media forms, and is interested in this broader relation between the “inside” and “outside,” that is how media and culture are formed in relation to social change and how what we take as “canon” constructs, subverts, or maintains social difference. In my writing about my experience growing up in poverty in rural Texas before entering elite institutional spaces, I attempt to mobilize the theoretical interventions and strategies I glean from my research. This public scholarship aims to make my work accessible both inside and outside academia.
I am currently a PhD candidate at Stanford University, funded by the Knight-Hennessy Global Leadership Fellowship, the Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, and the Stanford Humanities Center Digital Public Fellowship.
My dissertation project offers an intellectual history of the American Depression era that centers the entanglement between modern racialization and labor extraction methods as the American worker emerges in the popular imagination. Investigating the migration of reformist movements across the United States from the margin to the mainstream, I take the archive as my starting point and ask how our understanding of social difference changes as eugenic, proletarian, and racial protest visions collide in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. My work is currently under review by American Quarterly and English Literary History, among others.
Prior to graduate school, I built communications networks for the public service and social justice nonprofit Dwight Hall in New Haven, CT, and I graduated cum laude from Yale University with a degree in English and a nonfiction writing concentration. I grew up in a small rural community in East Texas and am the product of a working-class family which taught me how to survive in a world built to keep some people poor.