Biography
My first monograph, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary, appeared in 2020 with Fordham University Press. In this book I trace the withdrawal of the earth as a reliable setting, unobtrusive backdrop, and stable point of reference for literature written well before the current climate breakdown. Generous reviews have appeared in German Studies Review, Modern Language Quarterly, Monatshefte, symploke, and The Germanic Review. More recently, my translation of Sonja Neef’s monograph, The Babylonian Planet: Culture and Encounter Under Globalization, appeared with Bloomsbury late in 2021.
Currently, I am working on several essays that extend my existing interests in literature and geology into the fields of Jewish studies and memory studies. For A Companion to Adalbert Stifter, I am contributing a chapter on “Stifter’s Stones” that looks at his early novella Abdias and its overlapping racial and geological imagination; for a Routledge Companion to Ecopoetics, I focus on a collection of Celan’s and Sachs’s poems in dialogue and whose common refrain—wir Steine (we stones)—commemorates the dehumanizing effects of, and resistance to, racial violence in the Holocaust and the Anthropocene alike; for Reading Celan Today, a special journal issue that I am co-editing with Natalie Lozinski-Veach, my contribution takes the form of a reading of his “Low Tide” amidst “the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” to which Christina Sharpe attests in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
Another highlight of this year was my contribution to a fairy tale project with a wonderful artist collective known as Futurefarmers. Getting paid to write about fairy tales is itself a kind of fairy tale, so I keep pinching myself (and checking my bank account). I am also co-organizing the fourth and final year of the Transcultural Approaches to Europe colloquium with the Simpson Center for the Humanities, and we are planning a UW-focused colloquium on social justice pedagogies in the language and literature classroom.