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. In my dissertation project, “The Call of Kind”: Humanizing the Animal in American Literature, 1830-1918, I am exploring the influence of literary texts upon the development of humane education and the pet industry in the United States. Moving from Sarah Josepha Hale’s 1830 poem “Mary’s Lamb” to the establishment of the Jack London Club by the Massachusetts SPCA in 1918, my project considers how poetry, pet autobiographies, and fiction were all primary means by which writers humanized animals, 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 “humane” discourse, the modern pet industry, and small-animal veterinary practices. By attending to the profoundly influential role that humanization has played in the development of humane discourse and animal welfare, I wish to build upon and complicate recent posthumanist-driven arguments in the field of American literary studies.
In my future work, I am interested in exploring how we might connect the field of 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: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, Vol. 27, 2019
Review of Antoine Traisnel’s Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) for Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology (Winter 2022, Vol. 30, No. 1)
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)
Teaching Awards
Student Undergraduate Teaching Award, UNC Chancellor’s Awards, 2022
Awards
Robert Bain Award for Excellence Achieved by a Second-Year Student in Pre-1900 American Literature, 2018