I’m a scholar of Romanticism and Post-Romanticism, and a theorist of visual culture, poetry and poetics, and music.
My work especially explores the uses of images in relation to critical sustainability issues.
I’m currently available for collaborations that draw on my position as Program Coordinator of the Humanities Institute and Senior Global Futures Scholar with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University to bring the arts, humanities, and sciences together in new ways for public engagement.
I live and work on lands that belong to the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and the Piipaash (Maricopa) Indian Communities.
After completing my PhD in Art History at Northwestern in December 2021, I returned to ASU, where I did my undergraduate work in English.
I joined (HI), the Humanities Insitute for our new mission of supporting cross-disciplinary research with social impact.
My publications have appeared in Essays in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Portable Gray, among other venues.
Below are three examples of my most significant recent work.
Presenting “Images,” a paper on the critical democratic political formations adequate to the contemporary moment. Trienens Forum, Northwestern University, October 2022. Photo Credit: Elizabeth Upenieks
“Never Not in Crisis: Forms of Calamity in Catastrophic Times,” Myers Foundations Symposium
October 26-29, 2022
Tri-institutional symposium, hosted by the Department of Art History at Northwestern, with events at the IHR at ASU, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, and the Arizona Biltmore Resort.
The conference engaged with how the arts, humanities, and humanistic social sciences can give us the tools we need to meet the demands of the critical present.
I served as co-organizer and the symposium’s artistic director.
Composer and artist Corey Douglas Smith performing "MIDWAY" at the Arizona Biltmore Resort as part of the Fall 2022 Myers Foundations Symposium. Photo Credit:
Tamar Kharatishvili
William Blake, THE [FIRST] BOOK OF URIZEN, Plate 3 (detail), Copy G, 1818. Relief etching with hand coloring on wove paper, Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
My book, which I completed the manuscript for in early 2024.
The project builds on my dissertation, “William Blake’s Radical Ecology,” to engage how energy-intensive sites of environmental transformation condition affective sights of artistic production, crossing poetics, image practices and music composition.
The book begins with a study of how the visual artist and poet William Blake's illuminated books alongside the London symphonies of the composer Joseph Haydn responded to the emergence of Albion Mill in South London, the first site where multiple coal-driven steam engines were employed in a process of mass manufacture. With Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey as a critical heuristic fostering analytic leaps towards considerations of the future, the book continues with a chapter on glossolalia, post-tonalism, and sonic visuality in the work of the contemporary Icelandic musical artist Sigur Rós. It concludes with a chapter on the Diné poet-librettist Laura Tohe's opera, Enemy Slayer: A Navajo Oratorio.
“Sites/Sights of Ecology”
“Alternate Endings: Romanticisms, Anthropocenes, Objects Study, and Activist Art Futures,” with Kate Singer (Mount Holyoke College) & Kate Turner (Duke University)
A collaboratively-written essay forthcoming in Romantic Circles Pedagogies volume on “Romanticism and the Public Humanities,” edited by Elizabeth Effinger.
The piece elaborates on lessons learned from a seminar co-taught with Kate Singer in Critical Social Thought at Mount Holyoke College. The article is written by ourselves and Kate Turner, an alum of MHC and a participant in the class who is now pursuing their PhD at Duke.
Members of the seminar collectively curated and organized the exhibition, “Alternate Endings: Conversations on Climate Change,” at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, January 19-March 20, 2020.
Mount Holyoke College Environmental Studies faculty member Kevin Surprise speaking at the opening of “Alternate Endings: Conversations on Climate Change,” January 19, 2020. Pictured in background on table, In-Grave-d by Indira Poole (MHC ‘ 20), a series of laser-etched pieces of plywood. Poole’s wood-based support remediates pictures of trees located on the college campus. Photo credit: Kate Singer
Now, I’m passionate about positioning the HI as a global leader in humanities programming that contributes to the creation of scholarship, critical theory, art, and community engagement commensurate with the pressing needs of the current moment.
You can catch me in Tempe, or at the MLA convention in Philadelphia in January.
This is the composer Corey Douglas Smith and I, following the first part of Corey’s performance commissioned as part of the Never Not in Crisis Myers Foundations symposium. Pure joy involved in bringing form to the world. Photo credit: Davon Clark