I’m an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the English Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

I’m currently working on a book project about major genres of viral content, which, throughout the past fifteen years, have been prominent across social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.). Using a mixture of cultural-critical and computational methods, I argue that these genres, thanks in part to their unique modes of circulation and monetization, have promoted novel conceptions of ethics (or, ideas about “how a person should be”). An essay adapted from this project, on the genre that I call the “uplifting anecdote,” appears here.

My other major areas of interest include analytic philosophy, feminist thought, and therapeutic culture. My academic writing has appeared in New Literary History, Post45/Cultural Analytics, and JML: The Journal of Modern Literature.

I also write essays and reviews, often on digital or feminist themes, for venues like Harper’s, The Point, and Public Books.

Before coming to UIUC, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth, and earned a PhD in English from Harvard.

See my CV, here.