About
My research aims to understand how contemporary forms of nationalist and nativist populism are both rooted in and outlive modern social and political formations. To explore this question, I study modern and contemporary literature and visual culture from across the Americas. Through close readings of works of literature, cinema, photography, and visual art, I consider the ways these works frame themes of history, identity, and community, asking how they operate to evoke populist and nationalist sentiment. At the same time, drawing on the critical-theoretical traditions of political philosophy, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction, I explore sites of inoperativity in the symbolic order that governs our reception of these texts, asking how they might also appeal to suppressed, wayward, destructive, or liberatory desires and lay the groundwork for new ways of seeing and thinking the meaning of community and being-in-common.
Prior joining the department I worked in the biomedical sciences at Rockefeller University in New York City and the Life Sciences Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I contributed research to publications in the fields of signal transduction, aging, immunology, and tumor immunity. In 2010, I authored a paper on signal transduction and longevity, published in the journal Aging.
