English Graduate Student/L&L
About
Research interests: late twentieth-century US literature, poetry and poetics, translation theory, archival and bibliographical methods, the trans-Pacific
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My dissertation, “Trans-Pacific Edits,” studies the techniques, objects, and cross-cultural implications of literary editing during the so-called American Century. Pairing major authors (Robert Browning, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gerald Vizenor) with politically knotty sites of editing (respectively, the Rashomon effect, the authorized signature, the censored document, the draft manuscript), I chart a transnational history of US hegemony in terms of how the US translates the rest of the world for itself and likewise mediates its own global circulation amid “cold” and “hot” trans-Pacific wars. Concomitantly, I argue that antiquarian procedures for editing literary historical materials also constitute important historical content beyond the literary per se.
Another interest, separate from my dissertation study, concerns the poetics of scripts and of transcriptions. My research in that vein includes the article “ ‘Indigestible over days and days’: Reading transliteration in DICTEE and COMMONS,” which is forthcoming in Comparative Literature.
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Note on the selfie: I took this photo at Schloss Sanssouci in Potsdam, Germany. I first read about this palace’s history in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past. I first heard echoes of a melody composed there in Sofia Gubaidulina’s Offertorium.
