research
"You could say that the second most important feature of the American Dream was that the people should be counted."
— Ian Hacking, referring to the Article 1, Section 2 of the Constitution mandating a decennial census
"She would be so embodied in long parallelograms and in square and cube and rectangle. She wanted those things."
— H.D., Nights (1935)
"Numbers have such a pretty name. It can bring tears of pleasure to ones eyes when you think of any number..."
— Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America (1936)
"Mathematics is identity."
— W.E.B. DuBois, personal notebook
The premise of my research is that literature is a crucial interpreter of the cultural dimensions of science and technology and has always been an important means of exchange and dialogue with scientific philosophies, techniques, and idioms. Understanding the inherently interdisciplinary nature of literary studies and the expanding need for humanistic analyses of science and technology reinforces our ongoing relevance both within and outside of academia.
My project, Counting Subjects: Mathematics, Identity, and Modern American Writing, investigates how the increasing application of mathematical thought to social phenomena in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries changed the way modern American writers wrote about their world and themselves in it. I argue that attention to the abstract, theoretical mathematics of modernism has long overshadowed the profoundly influential developments of applied mathematics and statistics, developments that provide important context for understanding the philosophical imperatives of and interconnections among the period's most dominant traditions—realism, naturalism, and modernism—and challenge ongoing narratives of high-modernist exceptionalism and unfeeling abstraction. Through a variety of literary, historical, theoretical, and scientific sources, I show how quantitative techniques structured late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American political and economic life and defined conceptions of citizenry and subjecthood, becoming a constitutive force behind how we live and who we think we are. In the works of a diverse range of writers, including Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, O. Henry, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, H.D, and Gertrude Stein, I uncover how mathematical modes of description and analysis play an integral role in constructions of modern selfhood, particularly and perhaps most surprisingly in relation to competing conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality.
As a whole, this interdisciplinary project seeks to complicate the tendency, as Michael Whitworth observes, "to take science as a token of all that is wrong with modernity" and to derive a more dynamic understanding of the interrelationship of science and subjectivity as it unfolds within modern American writing.
- "The Subject of Accounting: Bookkeeping Women in American Literature, 1885-1925." Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, 45.2 (2012): 239-268.
- "Between Metaphysics and Method: Mathematics and the Two Canons of Theory." New Literary History, 39.4 (2008): 869-890.
- Review of Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything, by Joe Milutis. Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures 05 (2008).
publications
- Best Graduate Student Paper Contest, Second Place, Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference, Fall 2009
- Awarded for the paper "Balancing the Equation: Women Bookkeepers in Early Twentieth-Century American Fiction."
- Illinois Programs for Research in the Humanities Fellow, Fall 2008-Spring 2009
- Competitive, university-wide fellowship for focused research and participation in a year-long interdisciplinary Fellows' Seminar on the theme of "Disciplinarity."
- Summer Research Program Grant, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary, July 2009
- Intensive course for distinguished international faculty and graduate students interested in the cultural and historical study of mathematics. The theme of the course was "Mathematics and Narrative: Bringing Mathematics Back to the Cultural Mainstream."
- Department of English Competitive Fellowships
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- English Department Fellowship (Spring 2010, Fall 2008-Spring 2009)
- Winter Fellowship (Spring 2010)
- Hodgins Fellowship (Fall 2009)
- LAS Humanities Fellowship (Spring 2008)
- Summer Humanities Fellowship (Summer 2007)
- Donald A. Smalley Fellowship (Fall 2005)
- Competitive Travel Grants
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- Society for Literature, Science & the Arts Conference Graduate Student Travel Grant, Spring 2011
- Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Travel Grant Recipient (Fall 2006, Fall 2007)
- English Department Conference Travel Grant Recipient (2005, 2006, 2007)