About
I’m a first-year, assistant professor at Claflin University, an HBCU in South Carolina. My interests in decolonization stem from my family’s experiences with colonialism. My research focuses on integrating environmentalism with decolonialism, specifically in facilitating social and epistemic shifts that decolonize contemporary, Anglo colonial cultures with place-based, traditional and Indigenous cultures. I am also interested in how decolonization can be pursued in African diasporic communities. I have been an educator for fifteen years. I formerly taught history and English in secondary schools. I’ve also been involved with books to prisoners programs for fifteen years. I’m deeply committed to social and ecological justice and, in addition to teaching and writing, I love dogs, baking bread and running in the woods. Education
Ph.D. English, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, 2020
Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, 2011, 2012
M.L.A. Humanities, University of North Carolina Asheville, 2010
B.A. History, Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA, 2006
Publications
Co-editor, Books Through Bars: Stories from the Prison Books Movement, University of Georgia Press, forthcoming Spring 2023
“Pumzi” in Lexicon of Global Melodrama, ed. Heike Paul, Sarah Marak, Katharina Gerund, Marius Henderson. Bielefeld/ Columbia University Press, 2022.
“Human to Humus: Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille and Eco-linguistics as a Decolonialist Strategy,” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 9 no. 1, 2022
“The Alien Within: Divergent Futures in Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon and Niell Blomkamp’s District 9,” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 47 no. 3, 398-425. DOI: 10.5621/sciefictstud.47.3.0398
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
2022 “This Future Sucks: The MaddAddam Trilogy and the Perils of Eliding Colonial Destruction,” Modern Language Association, Washington, D.C., January 6-9
2021 “Fewer Trees Everyday: COVID, Wolfwalkers and Decolonizing for a Different Future,” The Claflin Literary Arts and Film Series
Memberships
Modern Language Association
Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (US and UKI)
American Comparative Literature Association
North Eastern Modern Language Association
International Association for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
Canadian Comparative Literature Association
Association for Literature Environment and Culture in Canada
European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture and Environment