As a scholar I study European modernism, working in the languages of German, Italian, French, Spanish, and English.
My current book manuscript, Stone, Steel, Glass: Architectures of Time in European Modernity, explores the cultural and literary history of modern perceptions of time through architectural models. Authors from whose work I draw my case studies include Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, W.G. Sebald, Marcel Proust, Paul Scheerbart, Vladimir Nabokov, and Primo Levi.
Interest in the creative potential of the crises of modernism led me to publish my translation of Lesabéndio: an Asteroid Novel, by the avant-garde German architect Paul Scheerbart. My translation of surrealist Unica Zürn's novella "The Trumpets of Jericho" is forthcoming from Wakefield Press in the spring of 2015.
As a Lecturer in Comparative Literature, I have designed and taught courses in comparative literature specifically for freshmen as well as for upperclassmen. Current courses include "Crisis: Twentieth-Century European Novels" and "Fear and Wonder: Natural and Unnatural Experiences of the Sublime."
Although I'm American, I grew up outside of the United States, living in Senegal, Yugoslavia, Ghana, and Austria before returning to the U.S. as an adult, a background that I feel is formative to my work as a comparatist. I received my A.B. from Harvard College in 1999, my M.F.A. from the University of Virginia in 2001, and studied at the Free University of Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship from 2001-2002. I received my Ph.D. from Harvard University in November 2010.