My research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American literature, culture, and visual art. I am interested in the relationship between affect and aesthetics and how represented violence functions as a nexus of form and feeling. My book, Painful Forms: Aesthetic Violence in American Literature and Art, 1945-2001, theorizes formalist strategies developed in post-1945 American literature and art that metabolize and respond to new discourses of structural and senseless violence. Drawing on aesthetic theory, queer theory, and archival research, the book examines work by Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Flannery O’Connor, Maryat Lee, Yoko Ono, Kathy Acker, Kathleen Hanna, Toni Morrison, and Kara Walker. Each chapter links form to feeling to show how aesthetic violence disrupts overdetermined discourses of suffering. Painful Forms will be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2025. Additional research interests include modernism and postmodernism, contemporary fiction, digital culture studies, affect theory, the phenomenology of reading, aesthetics, critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, visual culture, riot grrrl zines, American avant-garde formations, and theories of taste. My research has been generously supported by the University of St. Francis, the University of Virginia, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Emory University, and Duke University Libraries.