Biography
I am a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature and recipient of the Graduate Certificate from the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. My research interests span queer/trans studies, American literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the novel, realism, histories of sexuality, critical theory, aesthetics (particularly questions related to judgment and art’s autonomy), photography, and archival methods. My writing is published or forthcoming in Post45, GLQ, College Literature, and Esse arts + opinions.
My dissertation, A Glossary of Queer Animals: Gender-Sexual Typologies in the American Long Twentieth Century, concerns a topic curiously underexamined in gender and sexuality studies: the expansive typologizing practices undertaken by queer and trans communities past and present. Although “object-choice” models of sexuality achieved dominance by the middle of the twentieth century, gender-sexual typologies that contravene medical and state-sanctioned identities have proliferated in print media, digital cultures, bars, and personal ads alike. Across diverse literary and visual media, I chart the historical trajectory of individual types––bachelors, butches, clones, queens, and bears––tracing how they slide into obsolescence or dominance, accrete different political affects over time, and generate alternative forms of life.
My research has been supported by the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection and the Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in Lesbian Studies from Yale University. In 2025, I was awarded a Graduate Research Fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Library. I have been enthusiastically involved in cultivating Columbia’s intellectual communities for research on gender and sexuality, serving as a Graduate Fellow at ISSG and Graduate Affiliate of the Columbia Research Initiative in the Global History of Sexualities. I was the recipient of the 2025-2026 Teaching Scholars Fellowship in English and Comparative Literature, and will be teaching my seminar, “Queer Politics and Literature in the Time of AIDS,” in Spring 2026.
I received my B.A. in English and American Literature from New York University. Before graduate school, I was a middle and high school English teacher.
