• Aesthetics and politics of American print cultures
• Early Black and Indigenous print
• Transcendentalism and ideology (esp. Margaret Fuller)
• Harlem Renaissance literature (esp. Claude McKay)
• Critical theory, affect theory, sentimentality
• Contemporary poetry

As Senior Research and Teaching Associate, I conduct teaching, research, and advising on themes related to politics and print culture throughout American history. My publications and teaching so far have especially emphasized the nineteenth century, as my first book, American Malleability (De Gruyter, 2027), reads transformations in 1820s Black and Indigenous print as catalysts for a three-part rupture in ideology. I am especially excited by my recent investigations in early nineteenth-century Black and Indigenous print (especially newspapers) as well as my colonial-critical revaluation of Transcendentalist literature, especially by Margaret Fuller. To complete American Malleability, I conducted archival research in 2024–2025 as a Packer Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, a Thoreau Society Fellow, and a BAA Post-Graduate Research Fellow at Harvard. My new second-book project, American Primordial, will broaden my work at UZH to various centuries as I look at origin stories as a contested genre across American history: from the 1760s to the 1960s.

Originally from Annapolis, Maryland, I received an MA in 2021 and a PhD in 2025 from the University of Erlangen–Nuremberg. I am an active member of the Margaret Fuller Society, where I edit Conversations: A Publication of the Margaret Fuller Society. I am a poet, as well, and edit the literary journal The TRIAL: A Journal of Poetry and Politics.

I have recently been at work on a new article, forthcoming in European Journal of Musicology, that reconsiders sentimentality (by way Joan Baez’s radical engagements) as a democratic revolutionary tactic in light of the affective emergencies posed by late-capitalist algorithmic life. In summer 2026, an essay was released in which I ask why Thoreau is read as the father of “civil disobedience” in New England, and not, for example, David Walker and William Apess. It can be found, open-access, here. In 2025, a peer-review article was released in Amerikastudien, overviewing the literary-historical and theoretical arguments of my first book, American Malleability, and demonstrating them in close readings of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. It can be found, open-access, here.

As a poet, I have recently published pieces in The Yale Review, The Brooklyn Review, and Lana Turner—and, as founding co-editor, in summer 2026 am printing the debut issue of the literary journal The TRIAL: A Journal of Poetry and Politics. To continue my second-book project on American Primordial, I was recently named the 2026–27 Endowed Fellow in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, where I will be in residence in early 2027 to conduct research on early Black print cultures with focus on origin stories related to Liberian colonization.

• Transcendentalism and Its Afterlives: Margaret Fuller to Mamdani (Fall 2026)
• After Howl: Poetry Since 1956 (Fall 2026)
• Introduction to Literary Studies (Spring 2026)
• Writing Skills (Spring 2025)
• Rethinking the American Renaissance (Winter 2023)

I am available to supervise BA and/or MA theses. I would especially welcome projects dealing with contemporary poetry, nineteenth-century literature, early Black and Indigenous print, the Harlem Renaissance, Transcendentalism, and periodicals.