Degrees
2018, BA Classics, minors French & English, summa cum laude, University of Pennsylvania
Bio
I study classics and US poetry from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries. One of the central concepts that I explore for my dissertation is the influence of Platonism on ideas of originality and individuality in the American poetic tradition. My study ranges from the Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller to Walt Whitman to the belated Harlem Renaissance poet Melvin B. Tolson. An earlier version of this concept, entitled “Du Bois as the American Poet,” won the Graduate Student Conference Paper Award from the R. W. Emerson Society in 2023.
My interest in classical reception in US poetry first began in a modernism seminar that I took as a senior at Penn, and my interest in Plato began upon reading the Meno during a semester abroad at Cambridge.
Publications:
Scholarship:
- “Review of The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson.” Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin 35.1 (2023), 19-20.
Poems et al.:
- “On Hudson River.” Bayou (forthcoming).
- “My Mother Says.” Rattle 83 (2024).
- “Flux.” BlazeVOX: Fall 2021, 412-18.
- “Lai-jee.” Indiana Review 43.1 (2021), 85-92.
Teaching Awards
- Doris Betts Award for Excellence in Teaching Composition, 2023
Awards
External:
- Graduate Student Conference Paper Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Society, 2023
- Dickinson Critical Institute Grant, Emily Dickinson International Society, 2022
Internal:
- Bain Award (Excellence in Pre-1900 American Lit.), UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
- Travel Grant, UNC-CH DOECL, 2023
- Transportation Grant, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2022
- Travel Award, UNC-CH Graduate & Professional Student Government, 2022
- Booker Fellowship, UNC-CH DOECL, 2021
- Inclusive Excellence Top-Up, UNC-CH Graduate School, 2021