Curriculum vitae
Academic Appointments
Simmons University
Assistant Professor of English, 2018-present
Coe College
Assistant Professor of English, 2015-2018
Film Studies Program Coordinator, 2017-2018
University of Virginia
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English, 2014-2015
Education
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2014
Dissertation: “Restorative Justice and the Global Imagination”
Committee: Michael Levenson (director), Rita Felski, Caroline Rody
J.D., Wake Forest University School of Law, Law Review Executive Editor, 2009
B.A., Film Studies, Wesleyan University, with honors, 2006
Publications
Current Book Projects
Novel Repair: Restorative Justice, Global Literature, and International Law (in progress)
Constitution-Making and Global Indigenous Literature (in progress)
Articles and Book Chapters
“The End of Human Rights and Iraqi Fiction: Everyday Violence in Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition” (forthcoming in College Literature).
“Nadine Gordimer and the Force of Law,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies, Special Issue “Configuring Non-Linearity: A Reassessment of Nadine Gordimer’s Fiction, Vol. 41, No. 2, Spring 2019, pp. 75-90.
“Law and Literature, The Procedural and the Performative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights and Literature. Ed. Crystal Parikh. London: Cambridge UP (2019): 75-87.
“‘The Terrible Genius of Literature’: Reassessing Reconciliation in Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 14, No. 1, February 2018, pp. 100-120.
“Indigenous Constitution-Making in New Zealand and the Renewed Relevance of Keri Hulme’s the bone people,” Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2, December 2017, pp. 407-424.
“Remaking the Record: Emigrant Fiction and Restorative Justice in the Former Yugoslavia,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, Vol. 13, No. 1, February 2017, pp. 145-166.
“Localizing Human Rights: Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and the Lacuna in International Justice,” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Human Rights. Ed. Sophia McClennen and Alexandra Schultheis Moore. London: Routledge (2015): 299-308.
“Spaces of Torture, Spaces of Imagination: Refiguring Viewer Response to Suffering in Luis Camnitzer’s “From the Uruguayan Torture Series,” Special Issue on Humanities and Violence, Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 49, No. 3, 2014, pp. 713-726.
“Monkey Read, Monkey Do: Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect the Printed Speech of an International Genocide Inciter,” Wake Forest Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 4, 2008, pp. 1149-1185.
Book Reviews
Review of Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, by Gloria Fisk. College Literature, Vol. 45, No. 4, Fall 2018, pp. 873-76.
“Gregson v. Gilbert: Reading M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,” Human Rights special issue of
American Book Review, Vol. 36, No. 4, May/June 2015, pp. 6-7.
Honors and Awards
Fund for Research Grant, Simmons University, "Literary Tribunals and Legal Lacunas in West Africa," 2018-2019 (supporting three weeks of travel to archives in Nigeria, Ghana, and the Cote D'Ivoire)
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship, ASIANetwork Faculty Enhancement Program, “Contemporary Indonesia: Religious Diversity, Environmental Issues, and Political Transitions,” July 2017 (supporting four weeks of travel throughout the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali)
Beahl and Irene H. Perrine Faculty Fellowship, June-August 2017 (supporting research travel to
the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT)
Faculty Fellow, Iowa Campus Compact Service-Learning Course Development Institute, May
2017
Beahl and Irene H. Perrine Faculty Fellowship, June-August 2016 (supporting research travel to
indigenous archives and special collections in New Zealand and Australia)
Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, Coe College, 2016
Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the
Humanities, 2015
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Emory University, Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry,
2015-2016 (declined)
Postdoctoral Scholar, Provost’s Postdoctoral Interdisciplinary Initiative, University of South
Florida, 2015-2017 (declined)
Postdoctoral Preceptor Fellowship, University of Virginia, 2014-2015
Renate Voris Fellowship, 2014-2015 (supporting research travel to Mumbai, Jodhpur, Jaipur,
and Delhi, India and to Partition Archive at UC-Berkeley)
National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest Award, “Pablo Neruda and the
Global Politics of Poetry,” sponsored by the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of
America (ABAA), 2014
Selected Participant, Institute for World Literature, City University Hong Kong, Summer 2014
Bucker W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities Research Award, 2012-13; 2013-2014
(supporting travel to European archives during 2012-13 and to South African archives during 2013-14)
Fellow of the Institute of the Humanities & Global Cultures, 2012-13; 2013-2014
Rachel Winer Manin Interdisciplinary Fellow in Jewish Studies, U of Virginia, 2011-2014
Center for International Studies Fellowship (supporting travel to South Africa), 2013
Mellon Dissertation Seminar Fellowship, “Poetics and Modern Emotion,” Summer 2013
Everett Helm Visiting Fellow, Lilly Library, Indiana U-Bloomington, Spring 2013
Mellon Humanities Teaching Seminar, “Writing Human Rights,” 2012-2013
Arts, Humanities, & Social Sciences Research Award (supporting research travel to Eastern
Europe), Summer 2012
ABD Dissertation Research Award, University of Virginia (supporting research travel to
domestic archives in Washington, D.C. and New York), Summer 2012
Full-Tuition Alumni Council Merit Scholarship, Wake Forest Law School, 2006-2009
Wake Forest University Annual Award for Best Graduate Essay in Gender Studies, 2009
Wake Forest Law Review Annual Award for Best Note/Comment, 2008
Law Review Executive Editor, Wake Forest Law School, 2008-2009
Moot Court Honor Board, Associate Member, Wake Forest Law School, 2007-2009
Leavell Memorial Prize in Film Studies, Wesleyan University, 2006
University Scholarship, Wesleyan University, 2002-2006
Conference Papers and Other Presentations
"Literary Resistance in the Final State of Emergency," Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual
Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, March 2019
"Performing Indigenous Siberian Citizenship in the Works of Gennady Dyachkov," ACLA
Annual Conference, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., March 2019
"Fictions of Human Rights: International Law's Language Exclusions at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia," Literature and International Law at the Edge conference, New York University, December 2018
“Occupation and Désocupation through Literary Revolution: Évelyne Trouillot's Memory at Bay and the Creation of a Reimagined Haiti," Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Georgetown Law School, Washington, D.C., March 2018
“New Zealand’s Constitutional Crisis, Māori Exclusions, and Keri Hulme’s the bone people,”
Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, April 2017
“Negotiating the International Language of Human Rights in the Hybrid Tribunal for Cambodia:
Rethinking Justice through Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan,” MLA Annual Convention, Philadelphia, PA, January 2017
“Narrative Medicine: Human Rights and Remedy,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, University of Connecticut Law School, Hartford, CT, April 2016 (Panel Chair)
“Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition and the Ethics of Violence,” in seminar Human
Rights and Literature: Critical Reflections and New Directions, ACLA Annual Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, March 2016
“International Law, Local Remedy: Global Politics of the Laguna Pueblo Constitution in Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” MLA Annual Convention, Austin, TX, January 2016
“Human Rights and Frontier Justice in Thailand: Reframing the Political Western in Tears of
the Black Tiger,” MLA Annual Convention, Austin, TX, January 2016
“Juridical Sites of Reparative Violence: Ellison and Fanon in Dialogue,” in seminar
Vulnerability, Precarity, and Human Rights, ACLA Annual Conference, Seattle, WA, March 2015
“Languages of the Khmer Rouge: Literature, Translation, and the Extraordinary Chambers in
the Courts of Cambodia,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., March 2015
“From the Uruguayan Torture Series: Luis Camnitzer and the Politics of Bodily Pain in the
Southern Cone,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, VA, March 2014
“Reconciliation and the Literary Archive: Reexamining Post-Apartheid South Africa in
Nadine Gordimer's The House Gun,” Rachel Winer Manin Conference in Jewish Studies, February 2014
“Recovering Darkness at Noon: Literary Fictions and the Politics of the Totalitarian Novel,”
Jewish Studies Graduate Fellows Symposium, University of Virginia, January 2013
“A Legal Lacuna in the War Crimes Tribunals: Global Literature After 1945,” South Central
MLA Annual Conference, San Antonio, TX, November 2012
“Global Citizens: Translating the ‘Self’ from Central and Eastern Europe,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Texas Wesleyan School of Law, Fort Worth, TX, March 2012
“Sebald’s Austerlitz: The Novel as Testimony and Witness,” Jewish Studies Graduate Fellows Symposium, University of Virginia, February 2012
“Revitalizing Memory through Natural Destruction: Sebald’s City Sites and Spaces,” Northeast MLA Annual Conference, Rutgers University, April 2011
Panels Organized
“States of Emergency, States of Exception: The Chronotope in Law and Literature,” Law,
Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, March 2019 (with Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Ravit Reichman, Elizabeth Swanson, and Belinda Walzer)
“Global Indigenous Literature and Human Rights,” ACLA Annual Conference, Georgetown
University, Washington, D.C., March 2019 (with Alex Harmon)
“Borders and Boundaries: Claims within and Outside the State,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Georgetown Law School, Washington, D.C., March 2018 (with Ravit Reichman, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, and Angela Naimou)
“Exclusivity of the Law and the Law’s Exclusions,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, April 2017 (with
Ravit Reichman, Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Leora Bilsky, and Alex Harmon)
“Race, Hospitality, Humanitarianism: Approaches to Contemporary Narrative Forms,”
Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, University of Connecticut Law School, Hartford, CT, April 2016 (with Alexandra Schultheis Moore, Eleni Coundouriotis, and Crystal Parikh)
“Human Rights in Southeast Asia: Contemporary Perspectives on Language, Violence, and the
Law,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference,
Georgetown University, March 2015 (with Kerry Abrams, Lena Khor, and Mai-Linh Hong)
“Bodies in Pain: Spatial Violence and Legal Personhood in 20th-Century Literature,”
Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities Annual Conference, University of Virginia School of Law, March 2014 (with Ravit Reichman, Mai-Linh Hong and Nicolette Bruner)
“Violence and the Transnational Subject,” Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the
Humanities Annual Conference, Texas Wesleyan School of Law, March 2012 (with Marc Roark, Mai-Linh Hong, and Nicolette Bruner)
Invited Lectures and Presentations
“Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game," Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA, March 2019 (lecture accompanying 35mm screening of the film)
“Jonathan Demme: Cinema with a Rock’n’Roll Heart,” Coolidge Corner Theatre, Brookline, MA, January-February 2019 (5-week class exploring the relationship among film, music, and social justice in the films of Jonathan Demme)
“Global Indigenous Traditions: Why We Read Postcolonial Indigenous Literatures,”
Community Talk, Cedar Rapids Public Library, October 2017 (invited talk to publicize a collection of global indigenous literature books donated to the Cedar Rapids Public Library as part of a civic engagement project in my Spring 2017 capstone seminar class)
“Index of Influence: Pablo Neruda’s Politics and Poetry,” Gallery Talk, Coe College, October
21, 2016 (opening for an exhibit I co-curated, which features highlights from my personal collection of the books of Pablo Neruda in recognition of the 45th anniversary of his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature)
“Law as Violence: An Interdisciplinary Conversation,” Wake Forest Law Review Colloquium Series, April 2014
Teaching Interests
20th- and 21st-century global Anglophone literatures
Postcolonial literature and theory
Law and literature
Cinema and literatures of the Global South
Gender studies and feminist theory
Indigenous literatures of the Pacific, North America, and Northern Eurasia
Comparative race and ethnic studies
Ethnic American literature
Courses Taught
Simmons University
Immigrant Law & Literature ("Boston" Course), Fall 2019
The Art of Film, Fall 2019
Postcolonial Film, Spring 2019
The Postcolonial Novel, Spring 2019
World Drama & Political Performance, Spring 2019
Human Rights and Global Literature, Fall 2018, Fall 2019
Women in the Global South, Fall 2018
Coe College
Caribbean Literatures in English: Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the 20th Century,
May 2018 (May term study-abroad course in Haiti and the DR)
Anti-Colonial Literary Revolutions (honors seminar for the college), Spring 2018
Film Analysis, Spring 2018
African American Literature & the African Diaspora, Spring 2018
Resistance Literature (upper-level seminar), Fall 2017
Global Film History, Fall 2016, Fall 2017
Global Indigenous Literature (capstone seminar), Spring 2017
Constitutional Law: Race, Ethnicity, and the Law, Spring 2017
South African Literature, Fall 2016
Literature of War and Trauma (capstone seminar), Spring 2016
Postcolonial Literature, Spring 2016, Spring 2018
Human Rights and Literature, Fall 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017
Women in the Global South, Fall 2015, Fall 2016
Modern British Literature: The Immigrant Experience (upper-level seminar), Fall 2015
University of Virginia
Self-designed courses:
Contemporary Literature and Women’s Human Rights (Literature Seminar), Spring 2015
Cinema of the Global South (Humanities Institute Short Course), Fall 2014
Fictions of Human Rights (Studies in Global Literature Seminar), Fall 2014
Representing the Global City (First-Year Writing Seminar), Fall 2014, Spring 2015
Literature of Civil Rights (Black Writers in America Seminar), Fall 2012
Emigrants, Refugees, & Ghosts (First-Year Writing Seminar), Fall 2011, Spring 2012
As Teaching Assistant:
Literature of the South, Spring 2014
History of Literatures in English III, Fall 2013
History of Literatures in English II, Spring 2013
Academic and Professional Writing, Spring 2011
Shakespeare’s Histories and Comedies, Fall 2010
Service to Simmons University
Mission Statement Task Force, Gwen Ifill College of Media, Arts & Humanities, Fall 2018
Organized Speaker Visit, Wayétu Moore (novelist of She Would Be King), Fall 2018
Service to Coe College
Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) Faculty Advisor for Chicago Off-Campus Social
Justice Program, 2017-2018
Faculty Liaison for Civic and Community Engagement, 2017-2018
Steering Committee Member, International Studies Program, 2016-2018
Faculty Advisor, Coe Alliance (LGBTQIA+ Education and Awareness), 2016-2018
Faculty Advisor, Pre-Law Studies, 2015-2018
Faculty Advisor, Coe Human Rights Advocates, 2015-2018
Writing Committee, Designing and Implementing Writing Across the Curriculum, 2016-2017
Social and Criminal Justice Program Task Force for Curriculum Development, 2016-2017
Curriculum Development, 20th- and 21st-Century British and World Anglophone
Catalog Courses, Coe College English Department, Spring 2016
Organized/Hosted “LGBTQ Rights and Discrimination” Panel, April 2016
Organized Multi-Disciplinary Indigenous Studies Trip to Meskwaki Settlement, Tama, IA,
March 2016 (with faculty from Coe’s History Department)
Developed and Organized Annual “Winter Read” Event, English Department, January 2016
(Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah), January 2017 (Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home),
January 2018 (John Lewis’s Civil Rights graphic novel March)
Service to the Profession
Iowa Network of Human Rights Scholars, 2016-2018
Hosting Committee, Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (ASLCH)
Annual Conference, University of Virginia School of Law, March 2014
Reviewer for Humanities
Relevant Languages
Spanish, German, Russian, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (reading knowledge)
Professional Associations
Modern Language Association (MLA)
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA)
Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities (ASLCH)