Ph.D. in English, Vanderbilt University

I'm delighted to join St. Olaf College and the Environmental Studies department as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities. As a scholar and teacher, I'm drawn to St. Olaf’s commitment to integrating the humanities into environmental inquiry, and I'm especially excited to collaborate with students who are eager to think critically about the relationship between identity and  environment.

My teaching begins with the conviction that diversity—both ecological and social—is the fullest measure of our hope for the future. I encourage students to see that environmental issues are inseparable from questions of human difference and power, and that the way a story is told can be just as consequential as the story itself. In my courses, students explore global environmental media across genres and forms, experimenting with activities such as storyboarding adaptations, mapping texts against landscapes of extraction and resilience, and analyzing how cultural representations shape environmental imaginaries. My goal is for students to leave with both critical tools and a sense of creative possibility for engaging today’s ecological crises.

My research likewise examines how cultural forms mediate the intertwined histories of extraction, race, and gender. My first book project, Life of the Mined: Gender and Race in the Long Coal Century, argues that fossil fuel has been a crucial tool for reproducing white power as a conglomerate of psychic negation. A second project, tentatively titled A Reference for the End of the World, turns to queer and trans world cinema to explore how eroticized reproductions of Orientalist tropes expose the intimate entanglements of race, sexuality, and environmental collapse. My writing has appeared in Callaloo, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, the Transgender Studies Quarterly, and The Anthropocene: Approaches and Contexts for Literature and the Humanities.