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)

A couple of years ago, I lost my mind. I became completely immersed in the show Young Royals, and I could not understand why. That puzzlement led me to write this essay.

My experiences with the show and writing the essay constitute an inflection point in my thinking, reconnecting me with a sort of prelapsarian engagement with stories (the kind of engagement that led me to get a doctorate in the first place) and revitalizing how I approach scholarship, criticism, and writing.

All this led to my development of a new class, Feeling and Meaning Across Cultures, which attempts to explore how different languages and cultures articulate love as well as whether love is translatable across cultures. During the Spring 2026 semester, I will be documenting my development of the course, as well as my experiences teaching it, through blog posts. This collection of posts attempts to think through queerness and affect—and the queerness of affect—by transiting through different perspectives.

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).