About

Hello and welcome! I’m currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English, with a certificate in criticism and interpretative theory and a minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As an instructor for the department, I work with students in first-year composition and other courses to help them achieve their writing, career, and personal goals. My research focuses on Indigenous literatures and theory, with a particular focus on the Pacific. I engage with these literature to consider possibilities for listening-in-relation in settler colonies and to read texts written in moments of colonial encounter, especially those written in nineteenth-century England and the British colonies. Within that focus, I engage with Indigenous theory and rhetorics pertaining to orality, as well as sound studies and world literatures. I am particularly interested in the ways in which literature disrupts colonial discourse, even as it often seeks to maintain it. I received my MA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

In my current research into hybridity and constructions of empire through oral storytelling in the social-condition novel and other colonial fictions, I am interested in what happens when Indigenous theories of orality, silence, and empowerment are put in conversation with Victorian studies and postcolonial theory. In my master’s thesis, building on Ivan Kreilkamp’s work on orality in England, I examine the ways in which oral storytelling has persisted, even as it was perceived to be outmoded by the novel, and emerged as a transnational aesthetic to construct peripheral spaces in the English imagination.

Alongside my interest in nineteenth-century literatures, I am building on my work as a mentor to develop a pedagogy centered on student self-efficacy as collaboration. I look at revision as a tool for helping students gain ownership over their own writing with the goal of entering a community of writers who are able to collaboratively develop ideas. In gaining self-efficacy, I hope that students will be able to engage with their fellow students’ writing outside of the classroom.

In my free time, I hang out with my rescue rabbit, Sabrina, explore antique shops, and find new ways to brew and experiment with coffee and tea.