Broadly situated at the intersection of media history, ontology, and literature, my PhD dissertation investigates the ways in which Romantic lyric poetry and Gothic fiction take up and negotiate new technological modalities of being with the dead in the eighteenth- and nineteenth centuries.
More specifically, I examine the urban burial ground as a cultural technique for the medical, legal, historical, and communal inscription of human remains which, undergoing a structural crisis during the period, interfaces with an Enlightenment and Romantic poetics of dying and of living with the dead. Figuring the (dis)placement of remains, the grave becomes the site of an interdisciplinary encounter between aesthetics, urban planning, and empirical science.
My work tends to probe questions of structure and form through investigations of genre, lyric form, trope, German Idealism, Romanticism, Modernism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, semiotics, eco-criticism, and post-deconstruction media theory.
In addition to working as a part-time instructor in the English department, I am a coordinator at The Centre for Expanded Poetics where I am currently digitalizing and archiving the Modernist poetry journal transitions, as well as other out-of-print publications. My review of Alexi Kukuljevic’s Liquidation World can be found at Society and Space.