I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Virginia, where I study the novel with a special emphasis on British fiction from the 1680s to the 1890s. I am most interested in literature as a means of social imagination—as a set of tools with which we make sense of ourselves as at the same time discrete individuals and members of a wider collective world.
 
My dissertation theorizes one formal dynamic with which novels facilitate this sense-making. I call it the interpersonal field: a web of complex relations that forms between narrative personalities when these personalities purport to transcend the narrative discourse instantiating them. These personalities include substantive characters, who claim a personhood irreducible to text; local narrators, who affect a narrowly circumscribed authority; and we readers, who look on at the other personalities. The resulting narrative experience, I argue, is one of fluid engagement between character, narrator, and reader, its ultimate truth a provisional negotiation. I have an article adapted from this project, "Interpersonal Field: Characters, Narrators, and Readers in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko," forthcoming at ELH.

 
I also teach. At the University of Virginia, I have designed and taught standalone courses in composition and Victorian literature. I have also served as a teaching assistant for survey courses that cover English and North American literary history from the medieval period to the present. I have therefore taught a diverse range of literary genres, from poetry to prose fiction, essays, plays, and autobiographies. This semester, I am further broadening my experience to work as a teaching assistant in the Media Studies department.