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 identity conflict between lived experience and stereotype or bias. My work is broadly concerned with what it means to be representable in the media. I use digital humanities methods and close reading analyses to study how literature across the American canon constructs, subverts, or maintains difference. In my writing about my experience growing up in poverty in rural Texas before entering elite institutional spaces, I attempt to mobilize in action the theoretical interventions and strategies I locate in literary texts.

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. My scholarship is currently under review by Twentieth Century Literature and The Steinbeck Review.

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.