Research and Work 

My thesis, "Reading For Failure," establishes skeptical reading, a stylistically-instantiated theory of reading for failure. We have paranoid reading, reparative reading, psychoanalytic reading; we have close, surface, feminist, and historicist reading practices. I added skeptical reading. Driven by the failures and assumptions of social science, I embarked on a literary theory thesis. Little did I know that the violence of the letter is discipline-agnostic.  I wanted a reading practice that would shift problematics as well as critique them; by calling attention to the danger of static problematics, we can recognize the dialectical relationship between variables, populations, and "natural" objects. By privileging the work and the politics of form, skeptical reading resists falling in love with the forms we've been given. I developed a reading for failure to read economically rather than deconstructively: that is to say, I wanted to think about the traffic and competition produced by binaries and historically dichotomized concepts. Broadly and concisely, my thesis discusses various failures of social progress, and argues that these failures spring from failures of reading. The careful reader will notice that my thesis has absolutely no "literature" in it—I only worked with theory. Theorists include Saidiya Hartman, Lee Edelman, Hortense Spillers, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Jonathan Rosa. With just a tad of C.S. Peirce, Bruno Latour, Cleanth Brooks, Gloria Steinem, and Franz Fanon. I was awarded the thesis prize from the English Department for best thesis.  

• July 2025 - January 2026 I worked as a research assistant at the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at Stanford GSB. I worked on plagiarism, ethical review, and literary complexity for a project on AI-generated educational content for kids to learn English as a second language.  

• May 2025 - September 2025 I was Professor David Weil's research assistant in the Economics Department at Brown University. I helped to research, write, and edit a new book on population growth, focusing on global fertility rates.