Photo Credit: Chris Taylor
Current Projects: Poetry and Prose
Ecotones: My research of personal and environmental ecotones, the complex places where communities (wild, cultivated, human, and personal) intersect and overlap, employs a phenomenological investigation of emptiness and silent places in Western geography to interrogate my subjective experience of them and explore the interconnected nature of presence and absence. The tangible elements of transition zones (weather, geology, hydrology, human presence, and the interaction of all these elements) inform my writing about how language can hold space for unknowns, for knowledge that has been lost, or voices that have been marginalized.
Environmental Humanities: Drawing from my participation in Land Arts of the American West, this research examines images of travel and movement, motifs of negation, and tropes of intimacy, with both place and person, to understand distance and absence in subject/object encounters. I’m interested in degrees of distance, in discovering what else may exist within seeming dichotomies (together vs. alone) to parse out questions of identity, family, sexuality, landscapes, and history, while yearning for a broader perspective on what it means to be human.
PhD Scholarship
Gaps in the Archive: investigations around the means by which dominant archival narratives can erase nonnormative aspects of a historical figure's life and the role of the individual voice and imagination as a supplement to historical knowledge
The Contemporary Sublime: questions regarding the ways that literature makes the ineffable "effable," that reaches, as Longinus put it, “beyond the realm of the human condition into greater mystery”
Psychogeography: research into the intersection of place and psychology in literature
Ecotones: My research of personal and environmental ecotones, the complex places where communities (wild, cultivated, human, and personal) intersect and overlap, employs a phenomenological investigation of emptiness and silent places in Western geography to interrogate my subjective experience of them and explore the interconnected nature of presence and absence. The tangible elements of transition zones (weather, geology, hydrology, human presence, and the interaction of all these elements) inform my writing about how language can hold space for unknowns, for knowledge that has been lost, or voices that have been marginalized.
Environmental Humanities: Drawing from my participation in Land Arts of the American West, this research examines images of travel and movement, motifs of negation, and tropes of intimacy, with both place and person, to understand distance and absence in subject/object encounters. I’m interested in degrees of distance, in discovering what else may exist within seeming dichotomies (together vs. alone) to parse out questions of identity, family, sexuality, landscapes, and history, while yearning for a broader perspective on what it means to be human.
PhD Scholarship
Gaps in the Archive: investigations around the means by which dominant archival narratives can erase nonnormative aspects of a historical figure's life and the role of the individual voice and imagination as a supplement to historical knowledge
The Contemporary Sublime: questions regarding the ways that literature makes the ineffable "effable," that reaches, as Longinus put it, “beyond the realm of the human condition into greater mystery”
Psychogeography: research into the intersection of place and psychology in literature
Photo Credit: Chris Taylor