As a literary, cultural, and environmental researcher of colonial Alaska, I study the ways human communities have made contact and produced meaning across human and more-than-human differences.

I am an interdisciplinary scholar of literature and culture. Originally from Talkeetna, Alaska, I am currently pursuing a PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, with a certificate in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. At Columbia, I lead the Literature, Culture, and Environment Colloquium within my department and the University-wide Environmental Humanities Working Group.

Prior to joining Columbia’s department, I worked in Alaska at Outer Coast, an experimental college situated on an island in the Alexander Archipelago that reimagines education by centering place-based and Indigenous thought. While at Outer Coast—on the land of the Sheetʼká ḵwáan Tlingit—I began learning and engaging with Lingít language and thought.

I am currently working on two academic articles. The first reads John Muir’s Travels in Alaska to develop a critical method that unsettles his environmental imaginary: “reading from the canoe.” The second engages the oeuvre of the Ahtna Athabascan and Iñupiaq songwriter Quinn Christopherson to theorize how Indigiqueer artists refuse colonial subjectivity through a praxis of subjective erasure.

My work has been supported by venues such as the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Fellowship, the Provost Doctoral Fellowship at Columbia University, and Bowdoin College’s Kaufman Family Research Fellowship. My research has been awarded Columbia University’s Robert John Bennett Memorial Award, for the best paper in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences expressing original thought in comparative literature or across literature and the arts & sciences, and Bowdoin College’s Pray Prize, presented to a senior for excellence in English literature scholarship and original composition.