Associate Professor, Department of English and Creative Writing

I am a literary and cultural critic who specializes in intellectual history and U.S. autobiographical writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I use a number of approaches—theoretical, historical, formalist, and computational (sometimes called "digital humanities" or "cultural analytics")—to answer persistent intellectual problems. I am thus also interested in the critical analysis of twentieth-century and contemporary computation methods including machine learning, computer vision, and various approaches to text and data mining. My first book, Modernity and Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century America (Palgrave, 2017), concerns the relation between autobiographical writing, modernity, and technology in the work of Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry Adams. Critical Digital Humanities: The Search for a Methodology (University of Illinois Press, 2019), my second book, establishes a new theoretical paradigm through an account of new computer-aided techniques that are increasingly used in the humanities, including machine learning and text mining and their relation to literary hermeneutics and critical theory. Moonbit (punctum books, 2019), co-authored with Rena J. Mosteirin, explores the creative and critical potentials in the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer source code using critical code studies, erasure poetry, and critical theory. The Birth of Computer Vision (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), my third monograph, is a genealogy of computer vision and machine learning. It traces the development of a series of important computer-vision algorithms, uncovering the ideas, worrisome military origins, and lingering goals reproduced within the code and the products based on it, and examines how these became linked to one another and repurposed for domestic and commercial uses. I extend that work in my co-authored creative and critical book Perceptron (punctum books, 2025), an account of the first widely popular machine learning algorithm and its inventor, Frank Rosenblatt. In past years I have taught courses on the digital humanities, autobiography and selfie culture, critical AI, surveys of nineteenth-century American literature, and several courses on Dartmouth literary history, including one titled "Dartmouth Fictions."