Recent Publications
REFEREED ARTICLES
If you do not have access to any of the below articles, please email me for a copy.
- “Subverting Elitism with Equitable Assessment at a New England SLAC,” co-authored with N. Claire Jackson and Gabriel Morrison. Writing Assessment at Small Liberal Arts Colleges, edited by Genie Giaimo and Megan O’Neill. Forthcoming from Parlor Press.
- “Disclosing and Pedagogical Revision as Access.” Anti-Ableist Composition: Writing Studies and Accessibility in “Unprecedented Times,” edited by Ada Hubrig and Psyche Ready. Forthcoming from WAC Clearinghouse.
- “Cripping the Archive: Analyzing Archival Disorder in the Yamashita Family Archives & Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory.” American Literature, vol. 95, no. 5, December 2023.
- “New Narratives of Madness in Popular U.S. Television.” Screen Bodies, vol. 8, no. 1, 2023.
- “Between School Shootings and Systemic Gun Violence.” Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, vol. 3, no. 1, 2021.
- “Tortured Images in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer & the War on Terror.” College Literature, vol. 48, no. 2, 2021.
- “A (Head) Case for a Mad Humanities: Sula’s Shadrack and Black Madness.” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 4, 2018.
REVIEW ESSAYS
- Review of Elizabeth J. Donaldson, ed. Literatures of Madness: Disability Studies and Mental Health. Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1, 2021.
- Review of Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto, by Eric Tang, and From the Land of Shadows: War, Revolution and the Making of the Cambodian Diaspora, by Khatharya Um, MELUS, vol. 41, no. 3, 2016, pp. 204-207.
WEB-BASED PUBLICATIONS
- The School Shooting Fiction Archive. [Site in development].
- “Struggling to Teach with Word Vectors.” Featured on the Women Writers Project: The Blog, in response to the WWP’s Institutes Series: Word Vectors for the Thoughtful Humanist, 29 Aug. 2022.
- “Sharing the Page: Building Community with Annotation.” Featured podcast guest with Arun Jacob and Andy Boyles Peterson on behalf of #DHReads. Liquid Margins, 22 Jan. 2021.
- “Humanities Institute Fellows Examines Archive of School Shooting Fiction.” Interview with Kenneth Best, UConn Today, 7 Apr. 2020.
- “The Good Place’s Chidi Gives Me Stomachaches, Too (But Not Always from Laughing).” Medium, 14 Dec. 2018.
- “Dismissing False Narratives of School Shootings.” The Young Lawyer, Winter 2017/2018.
DISSERTATION
Writing National Tragedies: Race & Disability in Contemporary U.S. Literature & Culture. Click here to read more about my dissertation.
Writing National Tragedies examines the concept of the national tragedy in U.S. multi-ethnic literature, legal documents, and other cultural artifacts from World War II to present. In each chapter, I curate an archive of these documents for a particular collective trauma to consider how race & disability factor into who gets mourned (or ignored) and what’s memorialized (or erased). By analyzing how the state & public describe those affected by trauma, I demonstrate that deeming an event a national tragedy functions as a tool to legitimize certain kinds of violence, particularly against Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color and those whose bodyminds are considered “not normal.”
We see this, for instance, in the excuse that mental illness causes school shootings. Calls for increased medical surveillance hide the fact that the majority of school (and mass) shooters are “non-disabled” white men with a history of interpersonal violence, while disabled people and people of color are much more likely to be victims AND more likely to be harmed for acting “crazy.” These moments of national tragedy make legible the mechanisms of white supremacy and other acts of state violence — and perhaps also provide the means for effective collective activism against the state. Ultimately, what this suggests to me is that national tragedies are, certainly, traumatic experiences — but they are often not the full story. I finished my dissertation Writing National Tragedies as a UConn Humanities Institute Dissertation Fellow.
Recent Talks & Presentations
- “Youth Against Gun Violence and the Legacy of Anti-Racist Activism.” American Studies Association, Zoom, 7 Oct. 2021.
- “The Kids Are Alright: Social Media as Therapeutic Space,” co-presented with Sara Austin. Children’s Literature Association Conference, Zoom, 11 June 2021.
- “Developing Intersectional Disability Pedagogies.” Society for Disability Studies, SDS@OSU, Columbus, OH [Zoom], 20 Apr. 2021.
- “A Good Place to Be Mad: Moving Beyond Representations of Madness in Popular Culture.” Society for Disability Studies. Columbus, OH [Zoom], 5 Apr. 2020.
- “Madness & Empathy in School Shooting Fiction & Activism.” ChLA. Indianapolis, IN, 14 June 2019.
- “Pathologies of Mad Violence: Curating an Archive of School Shooting Fiction.” American Literature Association. Boston, MA, 25 May 2019.
- “Viral Media Campaigns, Suffering Children, & Other Recurring Failures of US Humanitarianism.” Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) Conference. Madison, WI, 26 Apr. 2019.
- “Transhistorical Rights Work Through James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time.” Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States (MELUS). Cincinnati, OH, 23 March 2019.
- “Developing Mad Studies.” Panel chair. Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). Washington, D.C., 22 March 2019.
Areas of Research & Teaching Interest
- Activism
- 20th- and 21st-century multi-ethnic American literature
- Affect studies
- American studies
- Children’s & YA literature & studies
- Comparative ethnic studies
- Critical refugee studies
- Digital humanities
- Disability & mad studies
- First-year writing
- Gun violence
- Human rights
- Memory & trauma studies