Hello! Thanks for dropping by my website. I am currently a PhD candidate in UBC’s Department of English Language and Literatures, working under the supervision of Dr. Sandra Tomc.

My dissertation thinks critically about the eugenics movement in the early twentieth-century United States, when the language of safeguarding a nation’s “health” was used to justify violence against target groups. I consider how this language is reworked in plague fantasies, a genre of writing that did a very different sort of work than journalistic, academic or legal writing. These fantasies contained not only the celebrations of racial purity and fear of racialized disease that one might expect from writings of the period; they also imagined “plague” spreading in strangely utopian ways, enabling characters to become one with the “monsters” they originally disdained. When we look at these writings, we see how totalizing the eugenic discourse was, but we also see how individual subjectivities can press against the discourse using the speculative space of fantasy.

(Some keywords: history of eugenics, political theory, nineteenth century, twentieth century, American literature, the Gothic, media studies, science fiction and fantasy, popular culture.)

While I work on finishing my degree, I am on the lookout for job opportunities that are a good match for my interests and skills.