Department of English

I am broadly interested in the relationship between the categories 'poetic' and 'political.' My project works against the reduction of 'political literature' to that which is representative, of the voice or reality of an oppressed identity, and questions the coherence of the (often mutually exclusive) categories 'political' and 'poetic.' My dissertation begins in recognition, via Black Studies and aesthetic theory, that racial representations underwrite the Western political and aesthetic (liberal) concept of the Subject. If Western aesthetic theory naturalizes representation and representability as the mode of perception and subjectivity, how might certain aesthetics denaturalize representation and offer nonrepresentational possibilities? How might certain aesthetic strategies in late 20th- and 21st-century poetics reveal blackness as relational rather than representational?

Courses Taught:

Critical Reading and Writing I: The Academic Essay
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Poetry and the Politics of Representation
How Poetry Matters: Reading Experimental Poetry in the Pandemic Era (Summer 2022)