I’m a literary scholar, writer, educator, and historian of ideas focusing on the intersections between our stories about science and technology and our social and material lives - and how both change over time.

My current book project, Science Fiction and the Modern World (in progress), considers the emergence of science fiction in the nineteenth century from the perspective of intellectual history - that is, 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.

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.