Profile
I am a literary and media theorist working at the intersections of narrative and sound. I am especially interested in the history of sound reproduction, practices and philosophies of listening, and their entanglement with race, memory, and nation. I am co-editor of The Faulkner Journal and a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies. I have served as an officer of The William Faulkner Society, The Joseph Conrad Society of America, and the 麻豆传媒色情片鈥檚 chapter of the AAUP. At Lang, my courses are comparative, bringing global traditions in literature and theory into conversation. My courses are also transmedial, engaging novels, films, music, performance, and photography. In addition, I teach single-author/artist courses, courses dedicated to modernism and literary theory, and, on occasion, practice-based courses on oral history and podcasting.
My first book, (Fordham 2020), returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in 鈥渞esonance鈥 an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. It follows transformations in narrative acoustics through the resonances between the work of Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman. In 2021, the book was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association first book award.
I am currently working on several projects. The first, 鈥淪tay with Me: Conversation Before and After AI,鈥 asks how the ways humans keep company with one another are being reshaped in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Working with an archive of materials across literature, film, and art, the book examines what happens to conversation when machines begin to simulate listening and speech. I am also at work on a monograph titled 鈥淎fter Images: Recitation and Listening to Violence.鈥 It is a study of witnessing in the age of broadcast and digital media, theorizing the ethics and aesthetics of mediating testimony through sound technology in the absence of images. Finally, I have recently begun studying the notion of 鈥渃orrespondences,鈥 pursuing echoes in transatlantic modernism and the aesthetic and psychological means through which sounds recur across time space to form queer, interracial, and exilic bonds.
Having been Associate Director of and a reporter for KALW鈥檚 Philosophy Talk, I have worked on various digital sound projects. In 2020, I produced in the time of COVID-19, which was recently acquired by the New York Public Library. I am a practicing musician and released with Silver Current Records, titled Only the Void Stands Between Us. In December 2024, it was Bandcamp鈥檚 Album of the Day.
Research and teaching fields
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Sound studies
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Digital humanities
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William Faulkner
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Joseph Conrad
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20th-century American literature and culture
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20th-century British literature
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Transatlantic modernism
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Narrative theory and the novel
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Film history and theory
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Psychoanalysis and theories of the subject
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Black studies
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Gender and sexuality
Degrees Held
B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies, Hampshire College
M.A., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Professional Affiliation
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Joseph Conrad Society of America (Trustee)
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William Faulkner Society (Officer-at-large)
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Modern Language Association
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Society for the Study of Narrative
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Society for Cinema and Media Studies
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American Comparative Literature Association
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Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, Yale University
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Digital Yoknapatawpha听
Recent Publications
Recent Publications
Monographs
The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form, Fordham UP (2020)
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Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles
鈥淗ello Stranger: Ellipsis and Song in Barry Jenkins鈥 Moonlight,鈥 Journal of Popular Music Studies 32 (2): June 2023, 10-14
鈥淏etween Sound and Image: The Otherworldliness of Bessie Smith,鈥 dossier eds. B. Ruby Rich and Michael B. Gillespie, Film Quarterly 76 (3): spring 2023, 48-54.
鈥淭he Future Anterior Witness: Women鈥檚 Voices Narrating Black Death,鈥 Social Research 89 (4): winter 2022, 1025-1050
鈥淪urface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in The Wooster Group鈥檚 The B-Side: 鈥楴egro Folklore from Texas State Prisons鈥 A Record Album Interpre迟补迟颈辞苍,鈥 Performance Matters 8 (1) 2021: 54-72
鈥淥utside In: Chorus and Clearing in the Time of Pandemic and Protest,鈥 Sociologica 14 (2) 2020: 1-14
鈥淢usic鈥檚 Unseen Body: Conrad, Cowell, Du Bois, and the Beginnings of American Experimental Music,鈥 Conradiana 48 (2-3) 2020: 143-162听
鈥淭he Fact of Resonance: An Acoustics of Determination in Faulkner and Benjamin,鈥 Symploke 24 (1-2) 2016: 171-186.
鈥溾楢 Sinister Resonance鈥: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad鈥檚 Marlow,鈥 qui parle 21 (2) 2013: 53-79.听
Selected Book Chapters
鈥淨ueer Overtones: Faulkner, Eisenstein, H.D.,鈥 in the Oxford Companion to Queer Studies, eds. Juno Richards and Hannah Freed-Thall (forthcoming)
鈥淢usic from a Farther Room: A Genealogy of Ambience between Psychoanalysis and the Modernist Novel,鈥 in Music, Sound, and Global Modernism, eds. Sherry Lee and Daniel Grimley (forthcoming)
鈥淪onic Afterlives: Listening in an Unreconstructed America,鈥 in Absalom, Absalom!: The Norton Critical Edition, ed. Susan Scott Parrish (New York: Norton, 2023) 663-676
鈥淢inor Sound, or Faulkner鈥檚 Acoustics,鈥 in New Faulkner Studies, eds. Pardis Dabashi and Sarah Gleeson-White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) 101-116
鈥淢edia History, Technology, and the Racial Unconscious,鈥 Cambridge Critical Concepts: Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith (New York: Cambridge UP, 2019), 190-208
鈥淓lliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading,鈥 Sounding Modernism, eds. Julian Murphet, Penelope Hone, Helen Groth (Edinburgh UP, 2017): 109-29
鈥淩avel Out into the No-wind, No-sound: The Audiophonic Form of As I Lay Dying,鈥 Fifty Years after Faulkner, eds. Jay Watson and Ann Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2012): 122-137
Selected Reviews, Blog Posts, and Conversations
鈥淎djacent Histories,鈥 with Amanda Armstrong-Price (special issue on the 20th anniversary of Denise Riley鈥檚 Am I That Name). History of the Present 11 (2) 2021: 209鈥222
鈥,鈥 Black One Shot 13 (4), ASAP/J. August 13 2020. Web
, 鈥淟istening to and as Contemporaries,鈥 鈥(T)racing Mother Listening,鈥 鈥淪hoo bop shoo bop, my baby, ooooo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, and Barry Jenkins鈥 Moonlight,鈥 in W.E.B. Du Bois at 150, Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. 24 September 鈥 08 October 2018. Web听 听听
鈥,鈥 with Marina Rosenfeld, continent 5 (3) 2016. Web. Featured as part of 鈥淧erspectives鈥 online portfolio of material and research behind the Kevin Beasley installation and sculpture, 鈥,鈥 Dec 15, 2018 to March 10, 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art听听听听听
Selected Digital and Artistic Projects
Project Producer and Interviewer, , an oral history of Henry Street Settlement, published March 23, 2022 (acquired by The New York Public Library)
Project Manager, 鈥.鈥 Julie Beth Napolin, comp., Johannes Burgers and Taylor Hagood et al., eds., Railton, Stephen, ser. ed. The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project: a born-digital critical database, network visualization, interactive map, and timeline. Submitted August 2014
Composer, performer, and producer, Only the Void Stands Between Us LP, released by Silver Current Records (2024)
Awards And Honors
鈥嬧婭rwin Yellowitz Award for Service to the New York State Assembly of American Association of University Professors, 2024
Conradiana听Best Essay Prize, 2020 (for 鈥淢usic鈥檚 Unseen Body鈥)
Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, 2018-2020
Provost鈥檚 Mutual Mentoring Grant for 鈥淛unior Women Faculty Group,鈥 麻豆传媒色情片, 2015-18
Mellon Fellow in the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, 麻豆传媒色情片, 2014-2015
The Joseph Conrad Society of America Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Prize, 2013 (for 鈥淎 Sinister Resonance鈥)
Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, 2001-2005
Woodrow Wilson Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 2000-2001