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. I am a specialist in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature and culture whose research interests span queer and trans studies, the novel, histories of sexuality, critical theory, aesthetics (particularly questions related to judgment and art’s autonomy), race and visual culture, photography, and archives. My writing is published or forthcoming in Post45, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, College Literature, and Esse arts + opinions.
My dissertation examines the expansive classification practices undertaken by queer and trans communities. Although “object-choice” models of sexuality achieved dominance by the middle of the twentieth century, vernacular gender-sexual typologies that contravene medical and state-sanctioned identities have proliferated in print media, digital cultures, bars, and personal ads alike. Across readings of 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 function as symbolic resolutions to social conflicts around race, gender, sexuality, and class in the last century of American culture.
My research has been supported by the Phil Zwickler Memorial Research Grant from Cornell University’s Human Sexuality Collection, the Sarah Pettit Doctoral Fellowship in Lesbian Studies from Yale University, and a Graduate Research Fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Library. At Columbia, I have been a Graduate Fellow at ISSG and currently serve as a 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, through which I taught a seminar titled “Queer Politics and Literature in the Time of AIDS.” I was awarded a Kluge Fellowship for 2026-2027 and serve as a mentor in the Columbia Undergraduate Scholars Program.
I was born and raised in Utah, and received my B.A. in English and American Literature from New York University. Before graduate school, I taught middle and high school English in Brooklyn.
