Degrees
2016, MA English, University of Missouri at Columbia
2014, BA English (French minor), Louisiana State University at Baton Rouge
Bio
I am a PhD candidate studying American literature of the long nineteenth century with a focus on critical animal studies, histories of natural science, and poetics. In my dissertation project, “The Call of Kind”: Humanizing the Animal in American Literature, 1830-1918, I am exploring the connections between literary genres and the emergence of the modern pet industry from Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1830 poem “Mary’s Lamb” to the establishment of the Jack London Club by the Massachusetts SPCA in 1918. I consider how poetry, pet autobiographies, and fiction were all primary means through which writers humanized animals during this period, thereby influencing material changes that were made to improve animal welfare; I postulate that works now deemed “literary” accounted in large part for the rise in pet-keeping as an industry and in modern veterinary practices. With my focus on humanization and animal welfare, I wish to build upon and complicate recent posthumanist-driven arguments in the field of American literary studies as I investigate the poetics of domestic animal care.
In my future work, I am interested in exploring how we might connect the field of critical animal studies with modern veterinary science; I thus wish to connect theory with practice with respect to animal care. I would ultimately like to develop ways for placing literary studies and veterinary science into more direct conversation with one another in a manner that is similar to, yet different from, the medical humanities.
Publications:
“A Posthumous Life: Thoreau and the Possibilities of Posthuman Biography,” The Concord Saunterer Vol. 27, 2019 (roundtable article from MLA 2019)
Review of Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life for the Emerson Society Papers (Fall 2018, vol. 29, no. 2)
Online Review of LeAnne Howe’s Savage Conversations for The Carolina Quarterly (March 2019)
Online Review of Caleb Johnson’s Treeborne: A Novel for The Carolina Quarterly (September 2018)
Online Review of Filip Springer’s History of a Disappearance: The Story of a Forgotten Polish Town for The Carolina Quarterly (April 2018)
Awards
Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018