About
Dissertation
My dissertation, "Give Me Solitude, Give Me Nature:" Green Solitude in 19th-Century America, reads across a variety of nineteenth-century American literary traditions in order to enlarge our sense of solitude in the period: To whom did it matter, how was it expressed, and what were its cultural and political contexts? Tracing a wide-ranging and sustained literary engagement with what I coin “green solitude,” I argue that this affective stance and its aesthetic expression grew out of the creaturely language developed through and popularized by American natural histories and Transcendentalist philosophy. Instead of connoting solipsistic individualism (viz., a variation on the trope of American individualism), green solitude multiplies relationality. This alternative vision of sociality responds to contemporary debates about abolition and women’s rights—both of which centered on subjects who lacked political recognition by the state. Green solitude, by contrast, projects arrangements of and rights to relational forms that extend beyond the human, imagining forms of enfranchisement secreted within the experience of the socially marginalized subject.
Other Committments
Editorial Assistant, Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning
Graduate Student Coordinator (2024-2026), Environmental Humanities Workshop
Co-coordinator (2022-2024), Critical Conversations
