About
I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science and a Graduate Fellow at the Institute for the Humanities. My research examines how people build power in response to injustice and oppression, with particular attention to how ideas and theories inform those efforts. My dissertation and future book project, That We Live Is Protest: A Conceptual History of Black Trans Resistance, grew from my experience working on a wide range of political issues alongside other trans activists. I wanted to understand why living, organizing, and protesting took distinctive forms within transgender communities and became curious about how incidents of trans resistance, past and present, might inform broader political movements and strategies.
Using archival and interpretive methods, That We Live Is Protest reframes a constellation of political concepts. Rather than foregrounding formally organized movements or publicly recognized acts of protest, the project examines how techniques of survival, aesthetic expression, and other worldmaking practices generate political possibilities and limitations within racialized and gendered regimes of power. I develop this argument by bringing disparate historical moments into conversation: fugitivity and gender nonconformity in the antebellum United States; practices of community defense in early twentieth-century ball culture; Pauli Murray’s refashioning of Gandhian nonviolence in the struggle against “Jane Crow”; and Murray’s later work and political commitments in Ghana. Moving across these histories, I show how attention to the interlocking operations of gender, race, and empire provides grounds for revising established distinctions between survival and resistance, self-making and collective action, and movement and belonging.
I have published on transness and migration in Theory & Event. Before pursuing doctoral work at Michigan, I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia and an assistant editor for the journal Political Theory. Outside of work, I enjoy caring for animals, woodworking, and brewing beer.
