ABOUT

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm [Musqueam] First Nation. I earned an M.A. in English from the University of Victoria in 2020. I earned an Honours B.A. with High Distinction from the University of Toronto in 2018 (English Specialist, Minor in Women and Gender Studies). I also serve as Managing Editor for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the flagship journal of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), housed at the University of British Columbia under the Editorship of Ramesh Mallipeddi.

I work at the crossroads of Romanticism, the long eighteenth century (1660–1834), and Black Atlantic studies. My dissertation, entitled Oubliette: The Atlantic Memory of a Portable Trope, investigates connections between Gothic fiction, slave narratives, and carceral figuration. It examines a tropology of carceral depth that first appeared in nonfiction period writing on the oubliette, a vertical dungeon that derives its etymology from the French oublier [to forget] and threatens the annihilation of an imprisoned subject. I identify the oubliette as a synthesis of the Gothic conventions of tyranny and live burial, examining the related use of flight and pursuit scenarios that involve networks of punitive power extending from tyrannical figures. For more information, see RESEARCH.

In my published writing, I attend to the history of the novel, the rise of professional women writers, and the diverse topography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature. Furthermore, I am fascinated by the migration of Romantic and Gothic aesthetics across borders and through time — from Horace Walpole to Goethe to Patricia Highsmith and beyond.

This website is also home to Notes on Cinema, a blog dedicated to critical reflections on cinema, especially those films pertinent to the Gothic mode and its trans-medial cultural history. Featuring original illustrations, Notes on Cinema is the blueprint for a book project, The Cinema of the Gothic, which investigates topoi of power/control, body horror and abjection, the mediated afterlives of the Enlightenment, and the relationship of terror/horror aesthetics to surveillance and gouvernementalité.