My research and teaching are focused on the poetics and ethics of ecological crisis and climate change, with particular focus on intersectional (fully human) and interspecies (more-than-human) approaches to climate equity, justice, and resilience. I’m also a scholar of science fiction literature and film from the mid-nineteenth century through to the contemporary era.

As of Fall 2023, my writing projects in press or in progress include essays on: a cross-reading of Belgian ethologist and philosopher Vinciane Despret’s 2021 novella Autobiographie d’un poulpe [Autobiography of an octopus] with French anthropologist and philosopher Georges Bataille’s 1941 novella Madame Edwarda, addressing Bataille’s dubious assertion that nonhuman animality exists in absolute, continuous immanence, without knowledge of negation; greening the self and releasing sovereign growth in the experience of planting trees; applying Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Uberleben (“afterlife”) of translation to the legacies of the simply terrible Victorian and Edwardian English translations of Jules Verne; and Verne’s and his illustrators’ textual and visual depictions of the American abolitionist John Brown.

I am working on three book-length projects: an edited collection of essays, Plant Life: Exploring Vegetal Worlds in the Harn Museum Collection, a collection of essays co-edited with M. Elizabeth Ginway, Latin America Writes Back: Political and Ecological Crisis in Science Fiction, and a single-author monograph, Beware the Blob, on the poetics of “unquiet matter” in contemporary climate fiction and film.