My research and teaching are centered 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. In my role as the Assistant Director for Humanities Research of the UF Astraeus Space Institute, I work to advance conversation and cross-pollination across UF’s space communities in the sciences, humanities, and the arts.

As of Fall 2025, my writing projects in press or in progress include…

• 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;
• a related sketch of a Bataillean blue ecopoetics, drawing on his frequent littoral and riverine figures of speech;
• an essay on the origins of the fatalist arc of environmental science fiction in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century accounts of the Second Law of Thermodynamics;
• an essay on Jules Verne’s interest in the 1888 opposition of Mars and reports by contemporary French and Italian astronomers of catastrophic flooding in the Martian region of Syrtis Major Planum;
• an essay applying Walter Benjamin’s concept of the Uberleben (“afterlife”) of translation to the legacies of the simply terrible Victorian and Edwardian English translations of Verne.

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.