Novel Repair: Literary Histories of Human Rights, Restorative Justice, and the International Criminal Tribunal System
This project demonstrates how literary fiction imagines plural histories of repair both in connection with and despite the development of the international criminal tribunal system. I begin at Nuremberg after World War II and end with the reformulation of international human rights trials in the early 1990s through the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the subsequent establishment of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). The manuscript brings together legal and literary texts, as well as primary source archival materials, to argue for a model of human recovery in which reparative readings reshape histories of human rights law.
Global Indigenous Literatures and Human Rights (co-edited with Alex Harmon)
In recent years, a variety of edited volumes have brought together works of scholarship that address the nexus between literary studies and human rights, often including analyses of Indigenous literatures as cases in point. This edited collection seeks to build on those volumes by centering the following questions: Is there a relationship among human rights and responsibilities, western legal logics and Indigenous epistemologies, and Indigenous literatures from seemingly disparate regions of the globe? The collection brings together scholarship with creative works by Indigenous writers, filmmakers, artists, and other makers.
Pablo Neruda and the Global Politics of Poetry
I have an award-winning collection of books by the Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda, which features rare books and objects from nearly 50 different countries and six continents, translated and published in dozens of languages. The collection focuses on the global politics of Neruda's work at various moments of war and tyranny in the twentieth century. My collection won a prize in the Library of Congress National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest in 2014. I've been interviewed about the collection in Fine Books Magazine, which you can read here, as well as by the antiquarian bookseller Books Tell You Why, which you can find here.
I co-curated an exhibit of highlights from my collection in fall 2016 in the Marvin Cone Galleries at Coe College: "Index of Influence: Archiving Pablo Neruda’s Poetry and Politics."