I am currently at work on my first book, Muting Modernism: Sonic Technique and the Culture of Silence, in which I examine the role of silence in technoculture through readings of literature and film, between 1901 and 1938.

The article Hearing Things: Gloria Naylor’s 1996, Havana Syndrome, and the Acousmatic Fantasy is forthcoming in Surveillance and Society. This essay examines Gloria Naylor’s bewildering last novel, which recounts a traumatic encounter with the surveillance state, one that begins with sonic harassment but ends with psychological instability (2005). As this essay argues, 1996 contests state surveillance not by reciprocating the data-collection process, but through fantasies of mystery voices and unverifiable—that is, acousmatic—sounds. The second section of this essay contends that increasingly ubiquitous and imperceptible surveillance technologies have made Naylor’s narrative strategy even more essential today. In 2016 American diplomats began to report hearing inexplicable noises as well as an array of neurological symptoms that news media have come to name Havana Syndrome. The diplomats’ government agencies largely dismissed their symptoms, and the experience of hearing things fell outside the procedures of clinical medicine, leading many to rehabilitate their minds through aesthetic means. This essay links the provocative narrative form of 1996 with the art therapies at Walter Reed Medical Center, before forecasting Naylor’s influence on the emerging counter-surveillant practices of the digital age.

Keep an ear to the ground for my book chapter, “T.S. Eliot, Black Musicality, and the Inaudible Past,” (forthcoming in The Sound of the Past: Modernist Echoes and Incantation, Vernon Press). This chapter examines T.S. Eliot’s recorded poetry and investigates the role of ragtime and jazz, as it transformed from live performance, to poetic representation, to live broadcast, to studio record. I make the case that by attuning poetic musicality to an abstracted and largely mythologized musical past, Eliot set himself up for a confrontation with the ascendent culture of mass media and the immediacy it foisted upon all arts that drew upon sound, whether acoustically or conceptually. While this collision of sound and silence is interesting to dwell on as a largely unacknowledged moment in Eliot’s intellectual biography, it is more pressing to study what their irresolution means for the many performances never preserved through text or technology.

My most recent publication, “Telegraphic Surveillance, Psychic Dislocation, and the Data of Black Biography,” (Arizona Quarterly, Spring 2024) emerged from my collaborative work on the Bound for Glory digital project. It builds on recent scholarship that has examined digital technologies’ role in surveilling Blackness, but this article traces those findings back through American history. I examine encounters with the telegraph in mid-nineteenth century Black biography, focusing on the technology’s role as a surveillance network that reshaped freedom-seekers’ concept of American location. This historical precedent to location tracking inflicted a severe form of psychic dislocation that calls into question conventional understandings of the data of slavery.

My article, “Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropometrist,” which appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 64.4, is part of a new coalescing project that will examine the history of racist science and connect modernist techniques for quantifying personality with their contemporary digital iterations through the work of Black novelists, arguing that these writers work within empirical frameworks to overturn their racist premises. In this article, I review the story of how Zora Neale Hurston’s academic scholarship began in physical anthropology, measuring Black bodies and relating this statistical data to racial type. However, her critics have understood her subsequent work in literature and folklore as fleeing her technical scholarship. This article gathers her work in anthropometry and the narratives of embodiment that she curated in Mules and Men (1935) under what Frantz Fanon theorized as “a slow composition” of “self as a body.” This rereading presents Hurston as an acute critic of her period’s eugenic interpretive methods whose writings anticipate the racism built into the anthropometry of contemporary facial recognition algorithms.

“Rhythmic Impersonality: The Legacy of Modernist Racialism in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time,” appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63.3. In it, I examine Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, Swing Time (2016), which explores rhythmic performance across a wide span of history and culture, from 1930s dance film, to West-African ceremonial rites, to international pop music. Smith’s unnamed narrator responds to the alluring universality of rhythm with a curious interpretive posture that severely partitions the physical embodiment of rhythmic performance from the personality and cultural contingencies of the performer. To access the motivations of this interpretive method, this article recounts the legacy of rhythmic impersonality: the social deportment of modernist rhythm science that inspired corresponding interpretive and performative methods in the arts and that continues to shape our present cultural hermeneutics. More broadly, this line of inquiry advances the contemporary novel as a means of studying and lamenting cultural critical apathy, as well as the historical precedents that sustain it.

“‘Wire with Something in it from men to men’: Robert Frost, the Rural Telephone Network, and the Poetics of Eavesdropping” appeared in Modernism/modernity 30.3. In this article, I establish the telephone as a poetically fruitful antagonist for Robert Frost, but my broader ambition is to reveal a constellation of countercultural auditory practices that overturned the telephone’s supposed scientific and information-oriented functionality.  I trace this auditory counterculture from the social context of rural telephonic listening, to the poetics of telephonic eavesdropping, to the spatial sociality of the early telephone network.  I aim beyond the explicit historical frame of Frost’s poetics toward a broader perspective on the relationship of literature and technology defined not by the transmission of sound as such, but by the imaginative listening modes that these media hold in common and cultivate synchronously. 

“Virginia Woolf, Anechoic Architecture, and the Acoustical Hermeneutic” appeared in Novel 54.3. In this article, I describe Virginia Woolf’s preoccupation with acoustics and its relationship to both her writing process and to the development of sensibility that she narrativizes in The Waves. I situate Woolf’s theoretical and fictional models of listening with respect to the rising science of architectural acoustics and to the social imperative to control sound in urban spaces. I argue that Woolf responds to the psychological and social exigencies of modern sound by integrating textual and architectural listening modes in what I identify as an acoustical hermeneutic: a listening practice common to the objects of architecture and text that accommodates both scientific and aesthetic ends. The acoustical hermeneutic marks the convergence of oft-estranged listening practices, one that apprehends the silent materiality of the text as if it were an audible room, and, conversely, one that apprehends architecture with the auditory imagination traditionally exerted toward literature. While I explore Woolf’s particular invocations of auditory science in her formal innovation, I also aim towards a widely applicable critical approach to the inaudibilities of the novel.

“Engineering the Ideal: Applied Modern Poetics as Applied Modern Science” appeared in The European Journal of English Studies 22. This article reviews the scholarship on the relationship between theoretical science and modernist poetry. Encouraging attention toward quite a different scientific milieu, I remind readers that at the beginning of the twentieth century, western audiences were principally enamoured of the applied sciences (or engineering) and especially the ideal of efficiency. The principles and processes of engineering permeated modernism, including its poetry, and, accordingly, the ‘science’ of modernist poetry is often an applied science. Specifically, Imagist and Objectivist poets implemented processes of optimisation and systematisation, which dramatise the iterative improvements that characterised the contemporaneous Efficiency Movement. That movement’s exemplar, Frederick Winslow Taylor, is remembered for conforming factory labour and labourers to exacting empirical ideals, leading this study to question the social repercussions of perfectly ‘efficient’ poems. However, poets H.D. and Charles Reznikoff actually disperse this impracticable ideal through their process-oriented forms. Thus, the modernist poetry inspired by the applied sciences revolves around scientific ideals, but it ultimately emphasises their fiction.