Academic Bio
I am a comparativist whose writing and teaching focuses on American, African American, French and Russian literature and art. Most broadly, my research concerns collective emotion as it takes shape in aesthetic and political forms. Increasingly, my work also considers how aesthetic practices themselves exert power by creating ways of feeling and modes of belonging and, in so doing, help to form groups capable of collective action. Motivating this work is my guiding sense that collective feeling is the (still relatively undertheorized) basis for collective political action.
My first book, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Harvard, 2008), considers modernism’s relationship to the experiences of modernity through its preoccupation with loss. It argues that not all melancholias are depressing, and it pursues this claim through its examination of a group of texts in which an attachment to loss becomes the very mechanism for being interested in the world and in others. Like Andy Warhol (Chicago, 2017), argues that Warhol’s enormous and diverse body of work can be understood as part of one ambitious ongoing project: “liking things.” Instead of the cynical affirmation of consumer society that some see in Warhol’s art, I find in Warhol’s promiscuous liking a utopian impulse, an effort to imagine and create new, queer forms of emotional attachment based on likeness and liking.
I am currently finishing a book called Black Leninism: How Revolutionary Counter- Moods Are Made. This book is about the formation of Black revolutionary moods, those moments when otherwise discouraged, alienated, depressed, or isolated people come together to form energetic, hopeful, and demanding collectives for whom victory against white supremacy feels possible. It identifies a particular Black radical tradition, which, in addressing the problems of group formation and collective feeling, picked up on the ideas of Vladimir Lenin and made use of them within existing Black political protocols. In 2022-2023, with the support of a Clark/Oakley Humanities Fellowship, I began to work on a new research project about liking and being like trees.
I have always enjoyed teaching classes in a range of areas: in modernism, contemporary literature, cultural studies, 19th and 20th Century American and African American literature, queer studies, aesthetic theory, affect theory, the novel, and Marxism. In Winter 2025, I’m teaching Media Aesthetics, Queer Theory and Queer Practices, and in Spring 2025 I am offering a classes on the Aesthetics of Agitation and Propaganda, and on Affect and Theory.