My primary areas of teaching and research are in nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, history, and literature. As an affiliated professor of the MU Honors College, I also have the opportunity to think broadly about humanistic discourse and literary tradition. My first book, Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France focuses on the persistent afterlife of utopias in the social imagination and in art. 

My research is situated at the crossroads of spatial humanities, urban studies, cultural geography, and socio-literary inquiry. I am currently writing a monograph that takes as its starting point the prodigious growth of the nineteenth-century Parisian guidebook. Yet this project is more than a book about books about sites and about sightseers. It proposes new interventions into the ways that the rapidly changing city was imagined, used, and commodified in guides. It problematizes the guide by leaning into this often-overlooked genre to better elucidate how it struggled to account for many of city’s emergent spaces – its rebranded monuments and novel attractions, its new railway yards and industrial sites, and its “underlands” and boarder zones – as they are captured and marked for use by its officializing narratives. I contend that it is here, in the city’s undecided and liminal spaces, that other guides and guide-like figures emerge. This project questions the guidebook’s cultural dominance as a product destined for a domestic and international leisure class by drawing on the experiences of non-conforming and marginalized bodies, recentering the importance of these unrecognized experts of the city and the guide-like genres they propose.

Book: Text, Image, and the Problem with Perfection in Nineteenth-Century France: Utopia and its Afterlives (London: Routledge: 2013, 2018).

“The Death of Utopian Politics in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France or What the Icarians Can Tell Us About QAnon, Conspiracy, and Our Political Moment,” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, (August 2022) 1-19.

“Aesthetics and the Methods of Visual Inquiry in the Photography of É.-J. Marey,” French Studies, Oxford University Press, 74.4 (October 2020) 554-571.

“Grimod de la Reynière, du guide gastronomique à la géographie du désir,” French Review, Johns Hopkins University Press, 92:1 (October 2018) 63-82.

“‘Les horizons du rêve’: Victor Hugo’s Utopianism,” MLA Approaches to Teaching Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, eds. Michal Ginsburg and Bradley Stephens (New York: The Modern Language Association, 2018): 120-128.