Biography
My research focuses on geology, and the imperiled earth more broadly, as a contested site of relations that are mediated through the literary and visual arts. My first monograph, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary, Fordham University Press, 2020), traces the withdrawal of the earth as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference in nineteenth- and early twentieth century literature.
I am currently working on a monograph, tentatively titled Fugitive Relations: Remembering the Holocaust in the Anthropocene. This work extends my existing interests in literature and the environment into the fields of Jewish studies and memory studies. Early versions of a few chapters have appeared in print. For A Companion to Adalbert Stifter, I contributed a chapter on “Stifter’s Stones” that looks at his early novella Abdias and its overlapping racial and geological imagination; for Reading Celan Today my contribution takes the form of a reading of his poem, “Low Tide,” that is attentive to the resonances between the commemoration of the Holocaust and the commemoration of the Middle Passage.
Collaborations at the UW have been a highlight of my time here, and I’m grateful to our Simpson Center for the Humanities for supporting my co-organized (with Jesse Oak Taylor) cross-disciplinary research cluster on the Anthropocene; the colloquium on Transcultural Approaches to Europe (co-organized with Olivia Gunn, Maya Smith, and Kye Terrasi) and, starting in the fall of 2025, a cross-disciplinary research cluster on relational memory (co-organized with Liora Halperin).
Translation is a part of my practice as well. This ranges from academic work (Sonja Neef’s monograph, The Babylonian Planet: Culture and Encounter Under Globalization (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Werner Hamacher’s essay, “For—Philology" (in: Minima Philologica) to community-based translation (letters and other archival materials for Seattle’s Holocaust Center for Humanity) to pedagogy and curricular development (leading a service learning course based on translating the Holocaust Center for Humanity's German-language materials into English; developing modules on translation, e.g. “translating extinction," for environmental humanities courses).
Another highlight of recent years has been my collaborations with the artist collective known as Futurefarmers. Projects include contributing an essay (“Fairy Tale as Ecological Form”) to a fairy tale book project, The Chestnut, the Sea Urchin & the Tuning of the Bells; an essay (“Unconsolidated Deposits”) for their show Soil Horizons, a lexicon of human-geological co-influence for their Pre-Human newspaper, and a performance talk for Trading Senses, an evening of perceptual adventures.
I maintain a highly irregular blogging practice, which has been hosted by Feedback and the DDGC Blog.