Biography
I am interested in researching 18th- and 19th-century British poetry (particularly Romantic lyric poetry) through the lens of formalist and rhetorical reading practices as imbricated with ecocritical and new materialist critical tools. I am especially intrigued by the ways in which Romantic poets deploy particular rhetorical strategies to register the radical "difference" of nonhuman natural objects -- their discontinuity with human conceptual patterns -- by cultivating a lyric mode that is neither mimetic nor expressive. To what extent and by what means can lyric -- a human product -- come to terms with what is inaccessible to the human? It was this question that I explored in my Master's dissertation on John Clare, completed at the University of Oxford, and which I've come to Columbia to investigate further across a broader range of poets.
