I am a doctoral candidate in English with a certificate in Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researching race, property, and media philosophy in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. My dissertation proposes a revisionist history of media studies that places at its center the racial and economic regimes of the period. I approach this new history through literary and cultural representations of mediation, or how we render sensible the fact that our lives are maintained by means of others. Through readings of literary works, including by Hannah Crafts, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Olaudah Equiano, and Maxwell Philip, and archival texts like patents for fictitious inventions, theological treatises on capitalism, and the new science of statistical mechanics, my dissertation uncovers the historical discourse of mediation as it shapes nineteenth-century ways of understanding racial economy as well as how we experience our own mediated age today.
My work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Early American Literature, and e-flux.