Research Agenda

My research interests span the fields of American Studies, Working-Class Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Black Studies, as well as poverty studies, the spatial humanities and the health humanities. I therefore take an interdisciplinary approach to my study of American literature of the long twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to examine how literature highlights the experiences of economically vulnerable populations. My research aims to show how literature, first, elucidates the ways in which scarcity is manufactured in order to disinherit the populations these novels represent; and, second, commemorates the alternative epistemologies, forms of sociality, and aesthetic practices that communities produce in response to disinheritance. My research agenda includes completion of my current book project, Abandoned Subjects: The Sociality of Survival in Modern American Literature, under advance contract with the University of Massachusetts Press. Future research will be dedicated to examining how contemporary U.S. women’s working-class fiction illuminates disproportionate vulnerability to illness while centering healing strategies, and how this body of literature redefines health and well-being. 

Abandoned Subjects asks how literature negotiates subjectivity for dispossessed women through depictions of “inhabiting abandonment”—that is, the subject’s making space to live where space has been withheld due to processes of marginalization. This project focuses on a body of literature that expresses a deep ambivalence toward representational structures and uplift projects. This ambivalence, I show, emerges from the understanding that representation is regulatory and can injure, intensify dispossession, and hinder ethical relations, while also potentially facilitating access to resources. I argue that authors like W.E.B. Du Bois, Will Cather, Anzia Yezierska, and Meridel Le Sueur attempt to resolve this ambivalence by having their female protagonists render their socioeconomic abandonment a practice of spatial intervention, creatively exploiting concealed and obscured spaces to petition for resources without revealing themselves to structures of surveillance or being made to assimilate to harmful socioeconomic norms. In this way, these authors each theorize an abandoned subject that engenders socialities of dispossession beyond survival. Abandoned Subjects integrates literary analysis with concepts from geography and the spatial humanities, as well as the social sciences, particularly poverty studies. My approach further draws on feminist and biopolitical theories that have sought not only to account for subjectivity in the context of the inequitable distribution of resources but also to confront dependency on recognition within injurious power structures. By asking how the literature of abandonment rebuffs the practice of seeking recognition within a dominant structure of power, Abandoned Subjects intervenes in discussions of the tangible harms resulting from poor and otherwise marginalized women’s missing stories by also considering the tangible benefits to the poor of hidden economies that elude narrative form. I have published two articles which became chapters in this monograph. “Abandoned Being: The Aesthetics of Inhabiting in Meridel Le Sueur’s The Girl,” an early version of the fourth chapter of my book, was published in Twentieth Century Literature in 2021. My article “A Swamp in Name Only: Imagined Geography, Abandonment, and the Archive in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece,” an early version of the first chapter of my book, was published in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction in 2023. I will submit a completed draft of my monograph to the University of Massachusetts Press in March 2026.

Following the completion of my monograph, I will write and publish an article based on research I conducted at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where I consulted the Sanora Babb Papers. There, I discovered a series of “shorts,” written by Tom Collins, about migrant life in Farm Security Administration (FSA) camps. Collins was the FSA migrant camp manager with whom both John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb worked closely in writing their Dust Bowl novels. Yet little has been written on Collins as a literary figure in his own right. This article will examine Collins’ shorts as a third text in relation to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown, both of which integrate Collins’ storytelling and which have already been read against each other amidst the body of migrant farm labor writing. This article will ask how the genre of the short, as a literary form that emerges from Collins’ management of migrant agricultural labor, is uniquely situated to represent the ephemerality of such labor during the Dust Bowl era. Steinbeck’s and Babb’s novels each follow one family, the Joads and the Dunnes, respectively, as they travel in search of work. In tracing their protagonists’ itinerary, these novels, I will argue, render them epic figures, while the novel form itself privileges modes of being that include stakeholding and filiation from which the protagonists have only provisionally been expelled. Collins’ shorts, conversely, depict a multiplicity of individuals and families as they come and go through the same frame—the federal demonstration camp. The unpublished short reflects a transience that does not presume teleological resolution; neither do these shorts, in the simultaneity of the stories, hinge on narrative time.

I have also begun conducting research for a second book project, which extends my work in literary poverty studies to late twentieth to twenty-first century U.S. multi-ethnic working-class and working poor women’s health narratives. In 1980, the Black Report upheld that social conditions—particularly class inequality—cause health disparities. By the mid 1980s, researchers coined and widely adopted the term “social determinants of health,” which later became institutionalized in research and policy through the World Health Organization. This study, which contributes to the field of the health humanities by asking how working-class women navigate socially determined health landscapes, also begins in the 1980s with an examination of Todi Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, and goes on to consider Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, among other novels and short fiction. In the spring of 2026, I will begin writing an article, based on my 2019 and 2020 conference presentations, on Ward’s Bois Sauvage fiction. This article will read motherhood in Ward through her engagement with the literal and figurative valences of the term “weathering,” which, in the health professions, refers to the sustained exposure to environmental health hazards, combined with chronic stressors, like poverty and racial violence, that degrade physiological resilience over time. Ward situates women’s health at the front lines of weathering and as the primary gauge of a community’s capacity to find healing within a biopolitics of disposability. This article will form the basis of a chapter in my second book.

Research Interests

American Studies

Black Studies

Contemporary American literature

Digital Humanities

Health Humanities

Poverty and Working-Class Studies

Public Humanities

Spatial Humanities

Twentieth Century. American literature

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies