I joined the Department of Humanities in 2011. My published work spans modern political and critical social theory, esp. Frankfurt School; utopianism; history and theory of discursive and filmic genres; history of literary criticism; cultural memory and affect; visual art. Other interests: ignorance studies/agnotology, surrealism.

Research Interests

I joined the Department of Humanities in 2011. My published work spans modern political and critical social theory, esp. Frankfurt School; utopianism; history and theory of discursive and filmic genres; history of literary criticism; cultural memory and affect; visual art. Other interests: ignorance studies/agnotology, surrealism.

My current research concerns the history of modern critical thought from the end of the eighteenth to the end of the twentieth century in relation to political economy and emerging conceptions of value. My focus in this history is on social critique’s affective dimension, the structures of feeling intertwined with the development of critical concepts and values, and their expression in the critico-nostalgic and critico-utopian currents of German and French thought.

I teach courses in utopian thought and literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels; in modernity's cultural moods of melancholy and nostalgia and their oft-intersecting histories; in the literature of transgression from the Middle Ages to the present; and in epistemologies of ignorance from Greek Antiquity to today.

Degrees

Appointments

Research Interests