Biography

As of 2023, I am an assistant professor teaching humanities and general education at the Chinese University of Hong Kong - ShenzhenI  received my PhD in American Studies from Harvard University in 2019 and was the postdoctoral fellow from 2020-2022 at the Center for Religion and the Human at Indiana University, Bloomington. Though formally trained in American Literature and American Art History, I like to call myself a chronocritic because my research has pushed me towards a fascination with the nature of time. Following this interest, I've branched out into Anthropocene studies, extinction, posthumanism, ethics, and environmental humanities.  My interest in temporality derives from a sense of my own mortality, or the very real mental illness—not yet DSM cataloged—known as FoMO ("Fear of Missing Out" or, the-grass-is-always-greener syndrome), which is, arguably, a type of temporal anxiety characterized by the feeling that one is at the wrong time, or not at the most-right time, given all the possibilities. Ethics, in the temporal sense, is a matter of filling one's time well, what Paul Chan describes as "making good on the task of fully inhabiting one's own demise," such that, at any given moment (everywhen), one strives to achieve a sense that one ought not to be elsewhere, or otherwhile. For me, chronocriticism is simultaneously a passion, an academic pursuit, and a therapeutic pastime. I believe that what people assume as their operating temporal metaphor fundamentally shapes their worldview, how they treat people around them, how they treat the world around them, their—in a word—ethics. These temporal metaphors are often underexamined, if not entirely overlooked. Expanding this topic from the individual to the scope of the cultural is the subject of my book project, Ozymandias in the Anthropocene, which examines public works of art that are meant to manifest some sort of imagination of the future. In the words of Arthur C. Clarke:


“The future isn’t what it used to be.”


Awards and honors
  • 2024
  • 2019
  • 2017
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  • 01

    2024

    Harvard - Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar Leader In collaboration with Professor Alexander Rehding, this seminar entitled “The Extinctuary: Reckoning with Apocalypse and Anthropocene,” invites an eclectic selection of artists, scientists, and scholars to discuss the extinction crisis.

  • 02

    2019

    Mahindra Humanities Center Dissertation Completion Fellowship, Harvard University This fellowship includes affiliation with the Visiting Scholars Program at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminar on Migration and the Humanities.

  • 03

    2019

    Harvard Radcliffe Exploratory Seminar Leader http://timegiant.org In collaboration with Prof. Giovanni Bazzana, this seminar entitled “Apocalypse: Now ~ Time, Ethics, and Eschatology,” invited an eclectic selection of artists, scientists, and scholars to discuss chronocriticism and the end of the world.

  • 04

    2017

    Harvard Horizons Scholar One of eight PhD candidates are chosen to receive in-depth, personalized mentoring and coaching designed to enhance their presentation skills. The program culminates in a symposium of brief, compelling talks where these scholars present their research from the Sanders Theatre stage.

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Publications

Essay: “On Human Extinction” in The Routledge Handbook to Material Religion, ed., S. Brent Plate (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2023)                                                                                           

                                                                                              

Essay: “Aeneas, Anthropocene, and Apocalypse, or, Aeneas in Space” in The Aeneid and the Modern World: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Vergil's Epic in the 20th and 21st Centuries, eds., Joseph R. O’Neill and Adam Rigoni (London: Routledge, 2021)                                                                                    

Essay: “On Creating a Useable Future” in Monument Culture: International Perspectives on the Future of Monuments, ed., Laura Macaluso (American Association for State and Local History:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)

Reviewed by Marc R. H. Kosciejew in Museum and Society 20, no. 2 (November 1, 2022): 326–27.

Reviewed by  Alison Atkinson-Philips in Public Historian, Vol. 3, August 2021, No. 3.

Reviewed by Juilee Decker in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,  57, no. 3 (November 2019): 295.

                                                                          

Article: “Inspiration as an Aspect of Monumentality: The Salk Institute Monument Lab, http://monumentlab.com (2019)            

                                                                                                        

Article: “So Long Silent Sam!—An ObituaryMonument Lab,
<http://monumentlab.com> (2019)

                                                                 

Article: “A Brief Taxonomy of Confederate Monument Apologism”                                        

Monument Lab, <http://monumentlab.com> (2018)                                                                                                           

Article: “’Going Aboard?’ The NBWM Moby-Dick Marathon,” Harvard Magazine, November-December Issue (2011)

                                                                                              

Peer-reviewed essay: “Foreshadowing Disaster, a Coming Storm,Coriolis The Interdisciplinary Journal of Maritime Studiesl <http://ijms.nmdl.org/>, Vol 1(2) (2011).

Reviewed by Paul M. Wright, Leviathan; Hempstead Vol. 16, Iss. 1, (Mar 2014): 160-163.