Research
phenomenology * skin * maternity * intimacy * transformation * ruin * love * ghosts * birth * undoing * hospitality * exhaustion * naming * touch * thresholds * space * time * technology * being-loved * tinfoil * starfish * being * writing
Book-Length Manuscript
The Ruins of Solitude: Maternity at the Limits of Academic Discourse
(forthcoming at punctum books, 2024)
While we conventionally define solitude as the absence of relation, Ruins presents solitude as a limiting measure of how we interact with and make meaning within a material world. Working to imagine an alternative to solitude, Ruins considers how this mode of embodiment intersects with knowledge production, exploring ways of being and knowing in the academy that refuse to perform or reproduce solitude. The book thus enacts a philosophy of togetherness, undergoing an intimacy of bodies, love, and writing such that solitude fractures. Through line breaks, exhaustion, interruption, and repetition, The Ruins of Solitude imagines a poeticity of selfhood and authorship uncontained by the tangible time of the present, unraveling familiar narratives and accounts of childbirth, considering the parallels between poststructuralist theory and the embodied materiality of relation.
Peer Reviewed Articles, Book Chapters, Interviews, and Reviews
Journal Articles
“‘Beside Myself’: Touch, Maternity, and the Question of Embodiment,” Feminist Theory 21.2 (2020): 141-155. (Winner, Joint First Place, Annual Essay Award)
“Between Belonging and Dwelling: The Hospitality of Remembering Babylon,” Cultural Studies Review 21.2 (2015): 205-222.
Chapter in an Edited Collection
“Jacques Derrida: The Mother as Figure of Thought,” Derrida and Africa: Essays on Derrida as a Figure in African Thought, edited by Grant Farred, Lexington Books, 2019: 33-45.
Introduction to a Special Issue
“The Responsibility of Awkwardness,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 24.1 (2016): 1-8.
Interview
“The Language That Can Bear Thinking: An Interview with Grant Farred,” Diacritics 50.2 (2022): 52-63.
Book Review
Review of Arne de Boever, Narrative Care: Biopolitics and the Novel, College Literature 43.1 (2014): 155-156.
Works in Progress
44: Discontrol and the Atlas of the Soft and Close
A book-length project that develops concepts for writing, theory, and philosophy by attending to the ways relationality responds to projects of futurity.
“’a series of thoughts and doubts and actions’: Countering Care with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o”
A response to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The Language of Languages, under review.
”Untitled”
An experiment in collaborative writing that follows the crossings of heart transplant, pregnancy, birth, and death in an effort to develop non-extractive forms of knowledge production that open to the poeisis of embodied kinship.