I completed my B.A. in English at the University of California at Berkeley and received my M.A. and Ph.D. in British literature from Fordham University (New York, NY). I have lived, studied, and taught in various cities around the world, including Paris, Florence, and Bangkok. After my PhD, I served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Fordham University, and then moved into my present position at National University of Singapore. In 2022-23, I was a Sassoon Fellow at The Bodleian Library, Oxford, and in 2024 served as a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Institute at Australian National University. I am also the incoming President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society.

The bulk of my research takes place at the intersection of literary and scientific endeavor. Specifically, I study how philosophical and scientific concepts are articulated in narrative and how durable those concepts are when they are translated into literary form and interrogated by a wide range of people. I am therefore interested not in whether certain scientific or philosophical concepts are tenable but rather how they behave in lived experience and, crucially, in writing. This focus on literature, phenomenology, and scientific modes of knowledge production means that I pay close attention to how eighteenth-century authors develop rhetorical strategies that are adequate to the demands of the earliest and most enthusiastic phases of British empiricism and, in turn, how empirical science borrows the techniques of imaginative writing. It also entails that I think carefully about how literature corresponds to other forms of knowledge making at a time when disciplines themselves are just beginning to differentiate.