I ground my scholarship in postcolonial theory, the medical humanities, and disability studies. I seek to situate and trace discourses of autism and cognitive difference in texts within the global context of colonization, from the emergence of eugenics in the nineteenth century to the present.
I first examined the representation of racialized cognitive difference in contemporary poetry and how this is complicated by postcolonial metaphors used to describe disability as an undergraduate. In one chapter of my undergraduate honors thesis, I considered silence, racialized disability, and the material archive in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio. Specifically, I considered how Jess’s audience reads the historical Wiggins against Jess’s “Blind Tom” Wiggins; I explore how syncopation and lyrical ahistoricism shape Wiggins as disabled and how the syncopated sonnets respond to Wiggins’s original compositions.
Increasingly, I am also interested in the concept of a “colonial archive” and how different texts of modern and contemporary poetry which focalize racialized and non-normative bodyminds operate against it—and how we likewise might respond to these spaces using a creative lens.
My undergraduate honors thesis led me to Leeds on a Fulbright: here, I continued exploring the recuperation of racialized subjects from archival spaces. I began work on an article examining the digital, paratextual framing of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s work in the British Library Archive. Propelled by my reading of Jess’s and Johnson’s poetry situated against dominant historic records, I examined the feral subject in Bhanu Kapil’s humanimal. In my thesis, I chart the interaction of the two Wolf Children in Kapil’s text alongside her archival source material, a translated edition of Singh’s “Wolf Children of Midnapore,” through overlapping postcolonial, new materialist, and disability studies frameworks.
I am currently working to compile and digitize the correspondence of the queer, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and revising my article on poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.
I also love to utilize my background in physics throughout my humanities research. Most recently I’ve written about Isaac Newton’s Principia alongside Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova alongside Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
public writing
The Creativity of Autistic Students in the Arts and Humanities
academic writing