I am an associate professor of English at Baruch College, City University of New York.
I specialize in early modern literature and critical theory. My research interests include the environmental humanities, sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, and film studies.
I am the author of two books: The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023) and The Earth Is Evil (University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). I am a coauthor, with Jean-Thomas Tremblay, of Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction (Northwestern University Press, 2024). My articles have appeared in differences, Critical Inquiry, Discourse, Cultural Critique, Criticism, and elsewhere. I am currently working on two books: “Unknowing Sex: Shakespeare against the Historicists” and “Trouble Every Day: The Psychopolitics of the Drive.”
I received my Ph.D. in English from Brown University. Before arriving at Baruch, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Tulane University. I serve on the editorial board of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies.
A selection of my published work is available at Humanities Commons. I tweet as @cat_unconscious.
Critical theory & the environmental humanities at Baruch.
Books
The Earth Is Evil (University of Nebraska Press, “Provocations” series, forthcoming).
Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction, co-authored with Jean-Thomas Tremblay (Northwestern University Press, “Superimpositions” series, 2024).
The Environmental Unconscious: Ecological Poetics from Spenser to Milton (University of Minnesota Press, 2023). Adapted into an audiobook.
Interviews
“Ark Thinking: Climate Change and the Great Flood,” with Jeffrey J. Cohen and Julian Yates. The University of Minnesota Press Podcast (August 2023).
“The Environmental Unconscious.” High Theory Podcast (June 2023).
ASLE’s Scholar of the Month Series (April 2022).
Articles
“Hamlet in Valhalla: History, White Supremacy, and Trauma in The Northman.” Exemplaria: Medieval, Early Modern, Theory. Forthcoming.
“Ecocriticism against The Wall.” Co-authored with Jean-Thomas Tremblay. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, online forum (2024).
“Destituent Ecology.” Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, Stratum 13 (2023).
“Epicures in Kissing: Asexuality in Venus and Adonis.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 34, no. 2 (2023).
“The Lost D.” Parapraxis Magazine (2023).
“The Weather in Sedgwick.” Critical Inquiry 49, no. 2 (2023): 165-184.
“The Violence of the Frame: Image, Animal, Interval in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac.” Cultural Critique 113 (2021): 131-161.
“Destructive Environmentalism: The Queer Impossibility of First Reformed.” Co-authored with Jean-Thomas Tremblay. Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 43, no. 1 (2021): 3-30.
“Introduction: Renaissance Posthumanism and Its Afterlives.” Co-authored with Karen Raber. Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 62, no. 3 (2020): 313-328.
“Nature’s Queer Negativity: Between Barad and Deleuze.” Postmodern Culture 29, no. 2 (2019).
“Object-Oriented Disability: The Prosthetic Image in Paradise Lost.” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 49, no. 3 (2019): 323-350.
“Idiot Science for a Blue Humanities: Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and Deleuze’s Mad Cogito.” Journal for Cultural Research 23, no. 1 (2019): 15-32.
“In Anthropocene Air: Deleuze’s Encounter with Shakespeare.” Early Modern Culture 13 (2018): 103-114.
“Tempestuous Life: Ralegh’s Ocean in Ruins.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 59, no. 4 (2017): 539-563.
“Unworking Milton: Steps to a Georgics of the Mind.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 7, no. 1 (2016): 120-146.
“Shakespeare’s Blush, or ‘the Animal’ in Othello.” Exemplaria: A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 28, no. 1 (2016): 70-85.
“The Life Aquatic: Liquid Poetics and the Discourse of Friendship in The Faerie Queene.” Spenser Studies 30 (2015): 229-253.
Chapters
“Nature.” In The Routledge Guide to Politics and Literature in English, edited by Matthew Stratton, 387-396. New York: Routledge, 2023. Accepted and forthcoming.
“The Clamor of Things: Moffett’s Gnats, Spenser’s Complaints.” In Lesser Living Creatures of the Renaissance, edited by Keith Botelho and Joseph Campana, 77-95. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2023.
“On Eating, the Animal that Therefore I Am: Race and Animal Rites in Titus Andronicus.” In The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals, edited by Holly Dugan and Karen Raber, 256-269. New York: Routledge, 2020.
“Dancing with Perdita: The Choreography of Lost Time in The Winter’s Tale.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Dance, edited by Lynsey McCulloch and Brandon Shaw, 197-216. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
“Milton’s Queer Earth: A Geology of Exhausted Life.” In Queer Milton, edited by David Orvis, 255-291. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.