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.