My training is in American literary studies, with concentrations in poetry, poetics, and modernism. I work at the intersections of literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, and the questions that fascinate me sit at the boundaries between disciplines, traditions, and intellectual communities. I think questions about art, aesthetics, and cultural history are best pursued in contact with debates in the natural and social sciences.

My dissertation, “Meeting Places: Entanglements of Art and Science in the American Literary Imagination,” traced how four writers across the long arc of American modernism responded to the rise of modern science as collaborators in a shared imaginative enterprise. Reading Emerson, Du Bois, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser alongside pragmatist philosophy and the history of science, I argued against simplified “two cultures” narratives by showing how a porous idea of science animated aesthetic experimentation and served, from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, as a generative resource for rethinking agency, history, and democratic culture.

My dissertation’s commitments continue to shape my work. One line of inquiry extends my interest in pragmatism and the history and philosophy of science toward non-reductive philosophical naturalism: how evolutionary theory, cognitive science, and naturalist philosophy might enrich rather than flatten literary and cultural study. This work has sharpened my sense of what is distinctive about human intelligence, normativity, and aesthetic judgment, and these commitments now bear on a different problem. My active research develops a grounded critical approach to the questions LLMs raise for humanities teaching and cultural criticism, drawing on a pragmatist lineage from Peirce through Sellars and Brandom, on science and technology studies and media theory, and on recent histories of computing.

Years of teaching undergraduates have deepened my sense of what humanities education can do. I see literary and humanistic study as integral to general education and to the personal and civic formation it is meant to support. Most of my writing is addressed to students and instructors and concerns what is at stake in the contemporary humanities classroom. I convene an annual interdisciplinary summer seminar affiliated with the Tautegory Project, a small scholarly collaborative dedicated to sustained cross-disciplinary conversation. This site collects what I am reading, teaching, and writing.