I am an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University. I received my Ph.D. in English from University of Texas at Arlington in May 2016. I specialize in early American literature, animal studies, ecocricitism, natural history and science studies, and digital humanities and media theory. My current research focuses on animal materiality in early American natural history texts.

 

My project, Strange and Unstable Bodies: Shifting Materialities in Early American Natural History Correspondence Networks, investigates what happens to animal bodies when naturalists incorporate them into the discourse and networks of natural history. Employing animal studies, posthumanism, and new materialism, I contend that, within natural history’s correspondence networks, there occurs a constant circulation both of ideas and information, as well as materials and bodies. Attending to this circulation and how it affects and is affected by nonhuman bodies shows how the shifting materiality of animal bodies in natural history results in changing forms of nonhuman agency, creaturehood, and a reevaluation of how humans construct knowledge from the material world.