Research

Book Project

His current book project is an intellectual history of mediation told through the literature and archives of transnational American Romanticism. Crafted out of Enlightenment science and philosophy, the etymologically linked concepts of “mediation,” “medium,” and “means” became seminal metaphors for nineteenth-century political economists, liberal philosophers, and Romantic writers to describe human existence as produced and perpetuated by means of another—whether another person, object, or even idea. Assembling a diverse array of sources—from American Transcendentalism to Black technical writing, from the Patent Act of 1790 to early photography manuals—the book tracks the emergence of mediated life as it shaped not only nineteenth-century ways of knowing but also the way we experience our mediated age today.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles

• “‘To modell out a land of so much worth’: Model Thinking in Colonial New England” (in preparation)

• “The Patent Form: Norbert Rillieux, Solomon Northup, and the Production of Means in the Atlantic World,” PMLA. Accepted and forthcoming.

• “The Parasitical Trick: Mediating Dispossession in Early America,” American Literature, vol. 95, no. 1, March 2023, pp. 89-113. (Honorable Mention for the 2023 Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published annually in American Literature).

• “‘…And the Gods Made Love’: Jimi Hendrix, Édouard Glissant, and the Critique of Sonic Empiricism,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 44, no. 2, Spring 2022, pp. 213-37.

Reviews

• “C19: Dissent.” Early American Literature, vol. 56, no. 3, Fall 2021, pp. 994-1000.

Public Writing

• With William Morgan. “Secrets and Machines: A Conversation with GPT-3.” e-flux, “Dialogues on Recursive Colonialisms, Speculative Computation, and the Techno-social,” no. 123. December 15, 2021.