Curriculum Vitae
Books:
We The Parasites: (2023 Sublunary Editions US/ Boiler House/UEA , UK) “Beyond Criticism” Series): Intertwining fig wasps, Updike, Homer, Genet, Twombly, Rilke, jewel heists, and a vividly rendered panoply of histories and myths from classical antiquity, We the Parasites both tells a strange love story and makes a slantwise argument about reading with the body, and what it ultimately means to know, and to want. We The Parasites uses life writing as an entry-point to queer-feminist auto-theory of criticism as method. The book was widely positively reviewed from the Brooklyn Rail to the TLS, and has been the subject of scholarly papers in theory and criticism, queer studies, literature, and art history, as well as the topic of conferences at museums, public centers, and invited lectures. The book was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award in Lesbian Nonfiction.
These New Fragilities (Forthcoming in 2027/early 2028 from Seven Stories Press, under contract): Continuing my signature methodology of autotheory in the lyrical, braided essay-memoir across disciplines, These New Fragilities treats the problems of a late and complicit world. It asks how to think about beauty and aesthetic pleasure in a time of great suffering and atrocity, made all the more visible in our lives online. Using a dialectic span of images from Sarah Kane plays and footage of genocide to the French rococo fête galante and Japanese postwar architecture, it also encompasses Said on Late Style, Montaigne, Dickinson, Auden, Eva Hesse, Agnes Martin, contemporary and classical ballet, the films of Derek Jarman, and the song lyrics of Leonard Cohen to ultimately circle around the nature of attending closely when in perpetual crisis.
Currently: Critic in Residence with joint adjunct teaching position at Integrated Design and Medium Program, NYU Tandon.
Previously: Max Weber Postdoc (International Bilderfahrzeuge Project) in Theory and Criticism of the Image, jointly at the University of London’s Warburg Institute, University of Basel, and Humboldt University
Concurrently with above: National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow (2021- 22), and lecturer at Central St. Martin’s (thesis and critical theory)
Visiting Member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford (Center for Classical Studies) + Bodleian Fellow
PhD: Chicago, 2018 (Art History), MA: Toronto, 2011 (Medieval Studies), BA: Yale 2010 (History)
Teaching And Administrative Experience: For over a decade, I have designed and taught classes from the continuing education level (in Chicago, Oxford, and London), to undergraduate lectures and seminars, to MA and PhD courses, and to individual tutorials. Most recently, my self-designed NYU courses focused on critical theory of technology (grad), critical theory of AI (grad, co-taught with artist Carla Gannis), and a public service introduction to art history and media studies through museums for non-humanities majors. I have advised MA, MS, MFA, and BA theses in critical theory, visual art, design, history, women’s and gender studies, queer theory, and more, at NYU-IDM, Central St. Martins, and the University of Chicago, where I also taught a self-designed undergraduate course. I have won, costed, and managed grants in the US, UK, and Germany/EU, and supervised students under me on these grants in creating and presenting their own work.
Public Writing:
Forthcoming Soon:
For The Toe Rag (winter, print issue, early 2026): “Decadence Obsédé”—on Huysmans’ À rebours, Nijinsky, Ovid in exile vs. Virgil in empire, Bruegel, and figuring decadence while living with the horror of the new
For Death Kit (February 2026)-- “Revenge Fantasies”-- epigrams on misogyny and the injustices of history, from Imperial Service Exams in Tang Dynasty China, to Japanese feudal peasant rebellions
For the Cleveland Review of Books (early spring, print issue, 2026): “Difficult Epigrams”-- on obsidian, volcanoes, scrying histories, Sybils, defiance, espaliered orange trees, and the love of difficult things
For The Public Domain Review: (Sprint 2026) “Pliny the Kitten”—on Pliny the Elder, the exhilarations of curiosity and joy in the mode of natural histories, and new love in a time of grief
Selected Recent Work:
12 November 2025-- For Dalkey Archive, a companion essay to the 2026 reissue of William Gass’ The Tunnel: “The Tunnel in the Age of Bad Men”—on current fascism, misogyny, and how and why to read difficult novels through the lens of feminist experience
3 October 2025 -- For The Pittsburgh Review of Books—"Not Not Revelation: On Negative Capability, Meister Eckhart, And The Paintings of Gotthard Graubner”-- A neurasthenic summer leads to an encounter with German painter Gotthard Graubner’s ethereal pillow paintings, sparking an unlikely meditation on medieval, mysticism, Romantic poetry, and the revelatory power of abstraction.
14 September 2025-- For the Berlin Review—“Let A Critic Dream About Open Rectangles-“- Notes toward a late criticism, on Motherwell's Open rectangles, Jerome Robbins' Afternoon of a Faun, and enjoining: "Dream About Me" as method. Auch in deutscher Übersetzung von Samir Sellami.
12 June 2025-- For the Cleveland Review of Books—“American Returns II: Another Collage”-- On An alt-right blackmail grift, James Madison, bulwarks of liberty, Joan Mitchell, John Ashbery, hemlock nights, felt and difficult Americas, bread and roses, lumps and trials.
5 March 2025-- For Cultured Magazine: The Critics’ Table-- in brief on Christine Sun Kim’s “All Day All Night” At The Whitney-- a witty triumph reflecting on language, sound, and silence in an anxious world
2 March 2025-- For Spike-- “Watching Swan Lake As the Post-War Order Collapses”-- on the NYCB/Martins Swan Lake, the new kakistocracy, and Cold War legacies; ballet review
20 November 2024-- For Minor Lits, “Goldfinch/Refusal: Mandelstam, Massive, and Form of the Novel in the Age of Atrocity”-- on John Trefry’s MASSIVE, and in general, novel as form in the wake of genocide Gaza, read through the life of Osip Mandelstam and the occasional Fabritius bird.
11 September 2024-- For the Berlin Review, “Pure Paint, Dead in the Air” -- (free with email registration)-- Some notes on Late Monet, the MiG-29 fighter jet, Rilke, stick jockeys, brushstrokes, lily ponds, stalling out, opening to the world, dogfights, delicate weapons, non refusals, and other risks of sensibility at the limit. (unpaywalled as plain text)
26 Feburary 2024-- For the Poetry Foundation, “But There Are Other Geometries” on being Auden’s “The More Loving One”, cube poems by Rimma Gerlovina, Descartes, failures of reason, dice, fate, and love. NB: This essay is now a chapbook in Finnish translation by Erkka Filander with Poesia, preceding the grant process to translate my first book into Finnish, and do work together on bringing more contemporary Finnish avant-garde literature to American audiences in return.
22 February 2024-- For the New York Review of Architecture “Good Bones”, on plastic surgery, always contemporaries, and Ed Ruscha at MoMA between New York and LA.
30 August 2023-- For the Cleveland Review of Books, “American Returns: A Collage”-- on Ansel Adams, Lana Del Rey, digital postphotography, desperation capital, and Americana
(spolighted on LitHub’s roundup, Bookforum’s Paper Trail, and in Vol 1 Brooklyn)
12 April 2023-- For the Verso Blog. “The Mutilated World”-- on AI images and fascist aesthetics and neoclassicisms, cryptostates, urbanisms, and Pasolini
13 September 2022 — For Hyperallergic “Marina Abramović, Mobs, and the Cult of the Hero” – on Marat/Sade, The Hero 25 FPS, internet mobs, and reading useful impurity in Abramović’s body of work
7 July 2022 — for Arebyte Gallery, “L’ Inconnue/L’avatar” — commissioned exhibition essay on La Turbo Avedon’s ‘Club Zero’— about Rilke, avatars, Seine drownings, faces, and the Bildungsroman of the digital self– starting on page ten of the linked exhibition booklet
16 June 2022 — for Artforum, Ethereal Presence: NFTs and the Theater Of Risk” — on Fried’s Art & Objecthood, theatricality, capital, and grace, using John Donne, Shl0ms’ $CAR and Folia’s Kudzu.
31 January 2021 — for Hyperallegic, “Waiting for the ‘Drop’: Crypto-Art and Speed”, a theoretical-historical piece defining crypto-art as catatachtics
13 December 2021– for Softpunk Magagine, “The Built Environment Makes Me Horny”— On Bachelard, The Internet Space, And Ruin
8 September 2021– For the LARB’s Avidly, “Twenty-Five Thoughts On The Method Wars”, a bloodbath of the current state of criticism as parafictional numbered essay
July 2021– For Review 31. “Give Me Difficulty”-– a review/critique of the British Museum’s Nero exhibition with a focus on historiography and the ‘new classics’ of postcolonial theory and praxis.
Late June 2021. For BOMB Magazine: ‘Duvet Theories‘; an experimental piece on softness, bedding, certainty, Fra Angelico, and Caravaggio. Issue 156 (in print late June, online later).
2 June 2021– For Review 31. “Old Cages, New Bodies, New Scrutiny— a review of Paul B. Preciado’s Can The Monster Speak?” and attendant issues in queer theory
14 February 2020, cover piece in the TLS: “Jack In Black: Reading Our New John Donnes”
2019- For the TLS, longform review-essay on the possibilities of new speculative fiction: ‘Tenderly Entangled’
2018- for the TLS, on Ursula K. LeGuin: ‘Language of the Making
Selected Academic Publications:
“The Nautilus And The Pearl: Accreting The Early Modern English Collection” (Journal of the Northern Renaissance, January 2022)
“Fleshly Wisdoms: Image Practices, Bodies, and the Transmission of Knowledge in a Sixteenth Century Alchemical Miscellany” (December 2017, Word & Image).
"Open Secrets: Alchemical-Hermetic Iconography In The Ripley Scrolls"— Abraxas. Special Issue No 1: Charming Intentions: Papers from the Conference at the University of Cambridge, 3-4 December 2012. Summer 2013.
Book Review: “Peter M. Daly. The Emblem In Early Modern Europe: Contributions To Theory Of The Emblem. (Ashgate 2014)” in Renaissance Quarterly 69.2 [2016].
Language And Other Proficiencies:
German (including Mittelhochdeutsch), French (reading and some speaking), Latin and Ancient Greek (reading), currently learning modern Japanese for basic speaking/reading and archival work, broad paleographical training on work in manuscript across languages
10+ years of dance training and performance in contemporary and classical ballet at Joffrey Ballet School (Chicago) with Kim Sagami, University Ballet of Chicago, Peridance New York (choreographer Julia Gleich, Dianna Warren).
(for my extra-long full academic CV as of spring 2023, click here)