About
I am a literary and visual culture scholar, whose research spans the fields of memory studies, performance studies, visual culture, and 20th and 21st century global literatures.
My dissertation, Feeling in Public, examines the political and performative stakes of witnessing, discovering how contemporary visual media innovates or exacerbates problems of representation and structures of spectatorship with memorials, monuments, and performances responding to historical violence. My work brings together memory studies and visual culture to contend that an act of bearing witness is always simultaneously a performance of bearing witness. Reading works by Anne C. Bailey and Dannielle Bowman, Jordan Wolfson, Joshua Oppenheimer, Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag, and Claude Lanzmann, I argue that the co-constitutive powers of memory and performance employed by these writers and artists experiment with form to represent the dangers of a too-easy intimacy, the limitations of the gaze, and the creative possibilities of failure and mis-performance.
Currently, I work as a tutor in the Writing Center at Henry Ford College and research in collaboration with a virtual reality humanities lab at the University of Michigan.
Fields of Study: visual culture, memory studies, performance studies, trauma studies, critical theory, 21st century literature
