I earned my PhD in English from the University of Chicago in 2025 and hold a BA in English from Kenyon College. I teach courses on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature, as well as in the Media Aesthetics sequence of the Humanities Core.
My research focuses on the intersecting histories of the novel, private philanthropy, and public welfare during the long eighteenth century. In my book project, Mutual Aid: The Novel in the Age of Benevolence, I argue that the early British novel developed as a cultural form to critique anxieties that receiving charity would interrupt an individual’s pursuit of independence by making them addicted to aid. In the face of these anxieties, eighteenth-century novelists embrace dependence on the kindness of others as a necessary and even desirable aspect of social life.
I am also at work on a second project, Captive Works, which extends my thinking about states of dependence by examining the relationship between antislavery writing and religious experience from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Work from this project is forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Studies.