I’m a literary scholar, writer, and educator interested in the intersections between science, technology and culture. I explore the stories we tell about science, scientists, innovation, and technology, as well as how ideas about them change across time and cultures.

My current book project, Science Fiction and the Modern World , considers the emergence of science fiction in the nineteenth century as capturing a fundamental recalibration in humanity’s understanding of its relationship to the natural world. This new worldview was one defined by contradiction, reflecting, on the one hand, a sense of unprecedented power over the physical world through technoscientific means, and on the other, a growing awareness of human insignificance and potential extinction as a result of accumulating discoveries in geology, paleontology, and biology. These ideas, I show, permeate our thinking to this day, from our sci-fi narratives to our discourses about the colonization of Mars and artificial intelligence. It is forthcoming in December 2025.

I am currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Illinois Wesleyan University. I received my PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019, and have held positions at the University of Chicago and Loyola University Chicago.