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 newly-appointed Assistant Director for Humanities Research of the UF Astraeus Space Institute, I aim to advance conversation and collaboration across UF’s space communities in the sciences, humanities, and the arts, working on the premise that space exploration, planetary science, and physical cosmology are more than scientific fields of endeavor; they are deeply enmeshed with human ethical, cultural, and imaginative legacies and futures.

As of Fall 2024, 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 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.

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.