My research primarily falls into two categories: literature and the environmental humanities and pedagogy. Within these categories, I am currently working or collaborating on four main projects:

Scroll down to read more about each of these projects (and a bonus side project on some past archival research).

Dissertation Abstract: My dissertation, “Changing Time(s): Ecopoetry for a Climate-Changed Future,” analyzes contemporary environmental poetry to locate models for navigating the uncertain timescales of the climate crisis. This project emerged in part from my experience teaching an environmental humanities themed composition course, where I witnessed an alarming level of climate anxiety among my students. Inundated by polarized representations of the future, my students felt unable to envision a future that accounted for the reality of climate change without succumbing to climate doomism. My dissertation explores contemporary poetry to find alternative futures and ways of imagining them.

I ground my project in a two-part claim about the temporal dilemma of the climate crisis: first, that the inability to imagine a future beyond climate crisis is due to the limitations of a linear temporal framework—an inherently colonial framework, as decolonial scholars have argued; and second, that poetry has the capacity to articulate nonlinear temporal orientations and, ultimately, to illustrate ways of living in this moment of temporal rupture. My dissertation explores how poetic forms and features may be both employed and revised to formulate nonlinear temporal orientations. I organize my study thematically, identifying forms and devices that work on dual levels: articulating a nonlinear approach that holds generative possibilities while also formally replicating this approach so as to engage readers in an embodied practice of nonlinearity.

“Changing Time(s)” begins with a critique of how a colonial linear temporality limits possibilities for imagining futurity in a climate changed world, subsequently examining three nonlinear poetic arrangements that suggest ways of living through and beyond the climate crisis. I first study the cyclical nature of time as represented in Joy Harjo and Craig Santos Perez’s poetry, tracing spatiotemporal patterns of repetition and return that counter the relentless, destructive inertia of colonial linear time by advocating instead for a relationship of reciprocity among humans and more-than-humans. Turning next to a consideration of how the climate crisis challenges linear figurations of ending, I study the use of the Whitmanian “catalog” device across several environmental poems, and I argue that a decolonial archival ecopoetics such as Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M. Archive: After the End of the World (2018) offers a way of grieving the vast loss of extinction without succumbing to the teleological finality of colonial linearity. My third section takes up questions of action and activism that haunt my first two sections. I outline a “lingering” ontology in Ross Gay and Harryette Mullen’s poetry to articulate ways of actively resisting colonial temporal frameworks without being absorbed into neoliberal constructions of activism. The introduction and conclusion expand my scholarly study to include a study of poetry in the classroom and in the community, thus grounding my theoretical argument in everyday encounters with poetry. Ultimately, my dissertation argues that these nonlinear ecopoetics offer viable models for adopting decolonial orientations to time that might help us imagine a future in which justice for both people and planet is possible.

Digital Humanities: In this ongoing research project, tentatively titled “Ecopoetry Online,” I use empirical ecocritical methodologies and digital humanities tools to study the circulation and impact of environmental poetry in social media spaces. The prototype for this project, which I developed with the support of the HASTAC Scholars Fellowship, used digital text analysis tools to identify correlations between semantic and syntactic elements of poetry (e.g. themes, poetic devices, diction, etc.) and the level of user interaction with the posts (e.g. likes, shares, and comments). In the current expanded version of my research, which I am developing into an article, I put the findings of this project in conversation with recent work in empirical ecocriticism to explore the potential for ecopoetry to act as a pivot point between environmental awareness and environmental action. 

Environmental and Sustainability Literacies: I am currently collaborating with colleagues in IU's rhetoric and composition department on an edited collection on sustainability literacies. Building on our co-edited special issue for Community Literacy Journal (Fall 2025) on the same topic, Composing Sustainable Futures: Cultivating Ecologies of Resistance in  Communities and Classrooms explores pedagogical and practical approaches for integrating sustainability literacies in community contexts and college classrooms. This project is under review at WAC Clearinghouse.

Critical AI Literacy: This book chapter presents a self-designed unit on integrating critical AI literacies in an upper-level literature and writing course, taught across three sections during the 2025-2026 academic year. This work emerged from an idea that the literature classroom facilitates a praxis of thinking and creating that is ideally suited for developing a robust AI literacy beyond simple usage competencies. The unit employs experiential learning, metacognitive thinking, and “slow pedagogy” to engage students in critical consideration of how Generative AI impacts the ways we think, learn, interact, and create. My chapter proposal has been accepted for the edited collection Teaching Authentic Thinking in the Age of AI.

Archival work: This project, titled “‘Nothing Exciting Happened Today’: Reading Blank Pages in Nadine Gordimer’s Diaries” studies the archived materials of anti-apartheid activist and writer Nadine Gordimer. I examine four diaries from Gordimer’s adolescence into early-adulthood to study her transition from, as Ronald Suresh Roberts puts it, “colonial child to postcolonial artist.” Though her diaries seem intended for personal use, they nevertheless refuse the inward turn that one expects from a diary. I trace the small-scale absences in her diaries—unfinished sentences, blank pages, and a lack of interiority—to shed light on an unusual lull in Gordimer’s writing during the 1940s. Reading these absences together, I argue, reveals Gordimer’s vision of herself as a writer-activist, someone for whom writing was not only a vehicle for her activism, but the very mode by which she remade herself as an activist. This project has been accepted for presentation at the 2026 MMLA Convention in Chicago, IL.