Essays

To attempt.

To rehearse.

To essay.

The collections of writing I’ve loosely assembled below are speculations and provocations that I believe I’m uniquely suited to contribute. They’re about everything and, thus, about nothing. Regarding a recent post, someone asked me what the thesis was (and how I heard the echoes of myself asking hundreds of students the same thing over the years!). And, I proudly replied that there was none–but that everyone who had read it had walked away with a fragment they enjoyed, something that stuck with them. So, this is not a place for theses, though I hope these corrallings of words strike a chord or two.

The Queer Parallax of Affect (forthcoming)

Whatever happened to the closet anyway?

Certainly, it exists, and millions of people, especially young people, wrestle with sharing the truth about their sexuality and/or gender with their communities for fear of being ostracized, beaten, or worse. But I take it as a given that in the mainstream cultural imagination, coming out might exist but the closet as such could be said to be made of glass, rigged to shatter at the slightest touch.

With that shift comes a set of expectations, uncomfortable as they might be for some, that the proper response to someone coming out is supposed to be an embrace, a pledge of support, and wild enthusiasm. Clearly, that is not the reality in many households across the United States and the world, but in Anglo-American media and popular culture, queerness is a feature not a bug.

Is Education Transformational?

This was my last project for a data storytelling class I took in the spring of 2025, a proof of concept than anything else.

Through visualizations and other visuals, I tried to use publicly available datasets to ask whether education is transformational.

The top line answer is unsurprising, which points to not the if of education but the how.

(Mis)Adventures in Distant Reading

Borne out of my doctoral dissertation, in this project I attempted to show through computational methods that 19th century U.S. fiction, through the genre of the custom sketch, alerts us to the waning of custom as an organizing principle for society and the rise of the law, particularly federal law, as the main source of social regulation.

Refashioning

Refashioning. That’s the thread that ties together six blog posts that take on remaking myself.

Four of these posts are about my own intellectual process, while the other two seem to be about reviews of critical digital humanities articles.

However, these review entries are also about my own intellectual refashioning, a process which has been long and dialectical (using this term sounds too on the nose…but I believe it’s accurate).