As an Associate Professor of English at Amherst College, I teach a wide range of drama and study a broad spectrum of "performance." My research, in the tradition of performance studies, uses "performance" as a lens onto broader cultural phenomena: e.g., the rise of "confessionalism" in postwar America, the phenomenology of reading, the reinvention of “humanity” in an age of A.I. and robotics, the conduct of American politics, etc. For more detailed information, see an up-to-date CV here, click on any of the tabs to the left or above, or check out my Amherst faculty page.
As director of Amherst’s Center for Humanity Inquiry (CHI), I work to make Amherst faculty and staff visible to each other as scholars whose humanistic work crosses disciplinary boundaries and serves publics beyond academia. I supervise CHI Fellows, curate weekly CHI Salons, oversee CHI Research Seminars, program the Presidential Scholars on Race & Racism, administer the Folger Undergraduate Research Fellowship, assist with Amherst’s annual LitFest, and so much more.
In my free time, I make books by hand, destroy other people’s books in the name of art, hike, bike, bake, cook, and provide epic laps for the cat in my life, Imogen.