I'm a writer, scholar and teacher of modernism and world literature. My body of work as a whole is motivated by a central question: how are we to understand literature’s social and political role, especially at times when this role has been thrown into question? I have pursued this question through two main areas of research to date. First, my work has focused on the representation of hunger in literature. Hunger has long fascinated me for the way it acts as an interface between political questions, especially questions of poverty and resource distribution, and aesthetic ones, especially as art engages autonomy and asceticism. Hunger reveals the body as a mediator between aesthetic and political life, and a central medium through which we each enter the world. Alongside this ongoing interest in the literary representation of hunger, my research has also cultivated a consistent focus on literary modernism as it spreads geographically and historically beyond early twentieth century Europe and the United States. Tracing this dissemination allows me to better understand the relationship between modernity and literary modernism, and to develop a clearer picture of the centrality of modernism to a global understanding of what literature is and how it operates across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I'm the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the co-editor, with Stephen J. Ross, of Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, which won the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Prize for an Edition, Anthology or Collection. I'm currently writing a book on the co-evolution of the ideas of world hunger and world literature during the period of decolonization.
I currently teach at Bard College, in upstate New York, where I am based in the Literature program, and affiliated with Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Global and International Studies, and French Studies. Previously I taught at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.
I'm a writer, scholar and teacher of modernism and world literature. My body of work as a whole is motivated by a central question: how are we to understand literature’s social and political role, especially at times when this role has been thrown into question? I have pursued this question through two main areas of research to date. First, my work has focused on the representation of hunger in literature. Hunger has long fascinated me for the way it acts as an interface between political questions, especially questions of poverty and resource distribution, and aesthetic ones, especially as art engages autonomy and asceticism. Hunger reveals the body as a mediator between aesthetic and political life, and a central medium through which we each enter the world. Alongside this ongoing interest in the literary representation of hunger, my research has also cultivated a consistent focus on literary modernism as it spreads geographically and historically beyond early twentieth century Europe and the United States. Tracing this dissemination allows me to better understand the relationship between modernity and literary modernism, and to develop a clearer picture of the centrality of modernism to a global understanding of what literature is and how it operates across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
I'm the author of The Art of Hunger: Aesthetic Autonomy and the Afterlives of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2018), and the co-editor, with Stephen J. Ross, of Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology, which won the 2021 Modernist Studies Association Prize for an Edition, Anthology or Collection. I'm currently writing a book on the co-evolution of the ideas of world hunger and world literature during the period of decolonization.
I currently teach at Bard College, in upstate New York, where I am based in the Literature program, and affiliated with Gender and Sexuality Studies, Human Rights, Global and International Studies, and French Studies. Previously I taught at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, New Zealand.