I am a literary and critical theorist whose work lies at the intersection of American literature, philosophy, and science from the nineteenth century to the present. My research reflects a dual intellectual formation: as a close reader of American literature trained in France, and as a scholar of critical theory shaped by the U.S. academic context. My early work (written primarily in French) focused on issues of literary figuration and animation, particularly within the context of the American Renaissance. My current research expands these concerns to examine the aesthetics and politics of conservation and extinction, paying particular attention to the biopolitical afterlives of settler colonialism and the ongoing impacts of climate change.
My first book, Hawthorne: Blasted Allegories (2015), reinterprets Hawthorne’s use of allegory as a critical mode of inquiry into authorship, meaning, and literary performance, situating his work in dialogue with thinkers like CS Peirce, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Derrida. A second book, Donner le change: L’impensé animal (with Thangam Ravindranathan, 2016), investigates how poetic and philosophical language in French thought is historically entangled with hunting and with vanishing conceptions of animal agency and gift-giving.
My third book, Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition (2020), examines how nineteenth-century U.S. literature, art, and science contributed to shaping a modern regime of animal representation in which animals are paradoxically imagined as both essentially elusive yet already understood, increasingly threatened and yet ever more tightly controlled. The book explores how this “logic of capture”—developed through figures like Audubon, Cooper, Poe, and Muybridge—emerged alongside settler-colonial expansion and underwrote new forms of biopolitical management tied to racialized violence. Capture offers a theoretical inquiry into how representational practices helped naturalize the systemic disappearance of animals and normalized the large-scale exploitation that continues into the present. At the same time, it considers how these same practices helped generate new aesthetic and medial forms, transforming the very nature of modern representation.
This work has evolved into a broader inquiry into how ecological systems are regulated and represented, from the figure of the trash vortex in the Pacific Ocean to Thoreau’s botanical thinking. Across these projects, I ask how literature bears witness to forms of life rendered vulnerable or disposable by colonial, racial, and economic logics.
In my current book project, Futureproof: The Biopolitics of Climate Survival and its Fictions, I examine the biotechnological imaginaries shaping today’s responses to mass extinction. From seed banks and cryonics to de-extinction and genomic engineering, I show how contemporary conservation projects are deeply shaped by speculative fiction and often operate through speculative logics themselves. Drawing on both biotech discourse and climate fiction, I analyse how these visions frame life as infinitely extractable, reproducible, and archivable. Futureproof argues that literature offers a vital counterpoint to this reductive view, insisting instead on the embodied, situated, and unrepeatable nature of life.
I mostly teach courses in American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. This year, I co-convene the MSt in English and American Studies and teach the A-course (methodology and approaches), a Paper 6 course on post-1945 American fiction, and a C-course on extinction in American literature. Prior to joining Oxford, I was an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, where I began teaching in 2015. At Michigan, I offered courses on nineteenth-century American fiction and biopolitics, critical and literary theory, and specialized seminars on authors such as Jacques Derrida and Octavia Butler. I also taught extensively in the areas of climate fiction and ecocriticism. I have supervised more than twenty PhD dissertations on topics ranging from nineteenth-century American literature, animal studies, and science and climate fiction to the intersections of literature and science.
