I am Head of Learning and Community Engagement at the Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University—New Brunswick. Previously, I was the inaugural Luce Foundation Curator of Academic Programs at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University. I have also worked as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I taught the introductory Humanities Core sequence called “Media Aesthetics” to first-year undergraduate students. While there, I developed programs for academic engagement, research, and interpretation in support of Art at the David Rubenstein Forum. During 2021-22, I co-curated a series of public events and an interdisciplinary working group called Getting Real: The Cultural Politics of Reality Television, which continues to serve as a hub for researchers working on the topic.
In my scholarly work, I advance lines of inquiry that intersect various academic fields, including art history, media studies, literary studies, and Black studies. I’m currently researching the transnationality and transhistoricity of the Spanish Civil War through its representations in twentieth- and twenty-first century art, literature, visual culture, and mass media, tracking the various ways that artists, writers, and activists in Europe, Africa, and the Americas have responded to that war since 1936. In addition to my scholarly writing, which appears or is forthcoming in American Literature, Modernism/modernity, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Grey Room, I often publish art criticism, essays, and reviews in more public venues like the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, Hyperallergic, and the Chicago Review.
I received my Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago in June 2020 where I was a Doctoral Fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities. I earned my MA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and my BA from the University of South Carolina-Columbia. I also completed a certificate in Spanish Language and Culture at the Universidad de Granada. Between finishing my undergraduate degree and entering graduate school, I lived in Barcelona and taught English at a public elementary school in Igualada where I learned Catalan. I am originally from rural South Carolina.