Bio
I earned a joint BA/MA in Classics from Yale in 2018, where I wrote a senior thesis examining adaptations of Euripides' Trojan Women by casts of Syrian refugee women (adapted chapters from this work have since been published in Eidolon (2018) and the Classical Receptions Journal(2019)). I then spent a year teaching English in Germany as a Fulbright scholar before joining the department in the fall of 2019.
I primarily interpret classical Greek tragedies as attempts to relate death to the politics of the living. I believe that death's negativity poses a basic challenge to the language and metaphysics of presence. For this reason, tragic characters' attempts to account for loss reflect the contradiction of trying to express the inexpressible. This contradiction, however, often proves poetically useful: in plays like the Trojan Women, the impossibility of successfully accounting for death initiates endless attempts at rearticulation, thereby instantiating active political struggle through lament. Examples like this determine my broader interest in the logic of negativity and the politics of mourning. By drawing from Marxist, feminist, and poststructural traditions, I hope to theorize a tragic politics which centers the generative power of contradiction and the liberatory potential of grief.
