Welcome! I am a scholar of Childhood Studies and Comparative Literature. I teach literature, writing, and dialogue across difference in theory and practice. My work focuses on the special role of children in social and political discourses of survival and recovery amidst and after trauma in the 20th and 21st centuries. I have a broad interest in contemporary world literature for and about children from all over the globe, but I specialize in multi-ethnic United States literature, Latin American literature, and Dutch Jewish literature. At the heart of my research is a concern with how cultural constructions of survival and recovery impact living children: the burden of performing post-traumatic resilience and the ways in which normative constructions of “resilience” are bound up with nationalism, White supremacy, ableism, patriarchy, capitalism, and more. Therefore, I have special interest in how narratives are circulated (and resignified) via K-12 education, (trans)national public memory projects, and translation. And I’m interested in the ways that dialogue, including oral and written forms of testimony and personal narrative, can serve to deconstruct and counteract punishing constructions of “survival” as individual triumph — both during and after childhood.
Currently, I am the Andrea Mitchell Center / SNF Paideia Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, I was a Mellon Engaged Scholar Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
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