Faculty

Profile

I am a literary and media theorist working at the intersections of narrative and sound. I am especially interested in the history of sound reproduction, practices and philosophies of listening, and their entanglement with race, memory, and nation. I am co-editor of The Faulkner Journal and a member of the editorial board of Sound Studies. I have served as an officer of The William Faulkner Society, The Joseph Conrad Society of America, and the New School’s chapter of the AAUP. At Lang, my courses are comparative, bringing global traditions in literature and theory into conversation. My courses are also transmedial, engaging novels, films, music, performance, and photography. In addition, I teach single-author/artist courses, courses dedicated to modernism and literary theory, and, on occasion, practice-based courses on oral history and podcasting.

My first book, The Fact of Resonance (Fordham 2020), returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in “resonance” an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. It follows transformations in narrative acoustics through the resonances between the work of Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman. In 2021, the book was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association first book award.

I am currently working on several projects. The first, “Stay with Me: Conversation Before and After AI,” asks how the ways humans keep company with one another are being reshaped in the era of generative artificial intelligence. Working with an archive of materials across literature, film, and art, the book examines what happens to conversation when machines begin to simulate listening and speech. I am also at work on a monograph titled “After Images: Recitation and Listening to Violence.” It is a study of witnessing in the age of broadcast and digital media, theorizing the ethics and aesthetics of mediating testimony through sound technology in the absence of images. Finally, I have recently begun studying the notion of “correspondences,” pursuing echoes in transatlantic modernism and the aesthetic and psychological means through which sounds recur across time space to form queer, interracial, and exilic bonds.

Having been Associate Director of The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project and a reporter for KALW’s Philosophy Talk, I have worked on various digital sound projects. In 2020, I produced an oral history of Henry Street Settlement in the time of COVID-19, which was recently acquired by the New York Public Library. I am a practicing musician and released a solo LP with Silver Current Records, titled Only the Void Stands Between Us. In December 2024, it was Bandcamp’s Album of the Day.

Research and teaching fields

• Sound studies
• Digital humanities
• William Faulkner
• Joseph Conrad
• 20th-century American literature and culture
• 20th-century British literature
• Transatlantic modernism
• Narrative theory and the novel
• Film history and theory
• Psychoanalysis and theories of the subject
• Black studies
• Gender and sexuality

Degrees Held

B.A., Interdisciplinary Studies, Hampshire College
M.A., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Ph.D., Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley

Professional Affiliation

• Joseph Conrad Society of America (Trustee)
• William Faulkner Society (Officer-at-large)
• Modern Language Association
• Society for the Study of Narrative
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies
• American Comparative Literature Association
• Black Sound and the Archive Working Group, Yale University
• Digital Yoknapatawpha 

Recent Publications

Recent Publications

Monographs

The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form, Fordham UP (2020)
 

Selected Peer-Reviewed Articles

“Hello Stranger: Ellipsis and Song in Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight,” Journal of Popular Music Studies 32 (2): June 2023, 10-14

“Between Sound and Image: The Otherworldliness of Bessie Smith,” dossier eds. B. Ruby Rich and Michael B. Gillespie, Film Quarterly 76 (3): spring 2023, 48-54.

“The Future Anterior Witness: Women’s Voices Narrating Black Death,” Social Research 89 (4): winter 2022, 1025-1050

“Surface Listening: Free Association and Recitation in The Wooster Group’s The B-Side: ‘Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons’ A Record Album Interpretation,” Performance Matters 8 (1) 2021: 54-72

“Outside In: Chorus and Clearing in the Time of Pandemic and Protest,” Sociologica 14 (2) 2020: 1-14

“Music’s Unseen Body: Conrad, Cowell, Du Bois, and the Beginnings of American Experimental Music,” Conradiana 48 (2-3) 2020: 143-162 

“The Fact of Resonance: An Acoustics of Determination in Faulkner and Benjamin,” Symploke 24 (1-2) 2016: 171-186.

“‘A Sinister Resonance’: Vibration, Sound, and the Birth of Conrad’s Marlow,” qui parle 21 (2) 2013: 53-79. 

Selected Book Chapters

“Queer Overtones: Faulkner, Eisenstein, H.D.,” in the Oxford Companion to Queer Studies, eds. Juno Richards and Hannah Freed-Thall (forthcoming)

“Music from a Farther Room: A Genealogy of Ambience between Psychoanalysis and the Modernist Novel,” in Music, Sound, and Global Modernism, eds. Sherry Lee and Daniel Grimley (forthcoming)

“Sonic Afterlives: Listening in an Unreconstructed America,” in Absalom, Absalom!: The Norton Critical Edition, ed. Susan Scott Parrish (New York: Norton, 2023) 663-676

“Minor Sound, or Faulkner’s Acoustics,” in New Faulkner Studies, eds. Pardis Dabashi and Sarah Gleeson-White (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022) 101-116

“Media History, Technology, and the Racial Unconscious,” Cambridge Critical Concepts: Literature and Sound, ed. Anna Snaith (New York: Cambridge UP, 2019), 190-208

“Elliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading,” Sounding Modernism, eds. Julian Murphet, Penelope Hone, Helen Groth (Edinburgh UP, 2017): 109-29

“Ravel Out into the No-wind, No-sound: The Audiophonic Form of As I Lay Dying,” Fifty Years after Faulkner, eds. Jay Watson and Ann Abadie (Jackson: Mississippi UP, 2012): 122-137

Selected Reviews, Blog Posts, and Conversations

“Adjacent Histories,” with Amanda Armstrong-Price (special issue on the 20th anniversary of Denise Riley’s Am I That Name). History of the Present 11 (2) 2021: 209–222

“Numbers Station [Red Record],” Black One Shot 13 (4), ASAP/J. August 13 2020. Web

W.E.B. Du Bois and Sigmund Freud three-part series, “Listening to and as Contemporaries,” “(T)racing Mother Listening,” “Shoo bop shoo bop, my baby, ooooo, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight,” in W.E.B. Du Bois at 150, Sounding Out!: The Sound Studies Blog. 24 September – 08 October 2018. Web    

“The Politics of the Musical Situation: A Response to Marina Rosenfeld,” with Marina Rosenfeld, continent 5 (3) 2016. Web. Featured as part of “Perspectives” online portfolio of material and research behind the Kevin Beasley installation and sculpture, “A view of a landscape,” Dec 15, 2018 to March 10, 2019, Whitney Museum of American Art     

Selected Digital and Artistic Projects

Project Producer and Interviewer, Hope and Resilience on the Covid Frontlines, an oral history of Henry Street Settlement, published March 23, 2022 (acquired by The New York Public Library)

Project Manager, “Adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury.” Julie Beth Napolin, comp., Johannes Burgers and Taylor Hagood et al., eds., Railton, Stephen, ser. ed. The Digital Yoknapatawpha Project: a born-digital critical database, network visualization, interactive map, and timeline. Submitted August 2014

Composer, performer, and producer, Only the Void Stands Between Us LP, released by Silver Current Records (2024)

Awards And Honors

​​Irwin Yellowitz Award for Service to the New York State Assembly of American Association of University Professors, 2024

Conradiana Best Essay Prize, 2020 (for “Music’s Unseen Body”)

Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, 2018-2020

Provost’s Mutual Mentoring Grant for “Junior Women Faculty Group,” The New School, 2015-18

Mellon Fellow in the Graduate Institute of Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought, The New School, 2014-2015

The Joseph Conrad Society of America Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Prize, 2013 (for “A Sinister Resonance”)

Jacob K. Javits Fellowship in the Humanities, 2001-2005

Woodrow Wilson Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities, 2000-2001