Biography
My research spans the late eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries and focuses on the politics of intermediality and the possibility of comparative research across lines of linguistic, cultural, and medial difference. My dissertation, “Rhythms of Liberation: Musicking between Media in the Age of Globalization,” draws together musical works, productions, performance events, and traditions that subvert the homogenizing impulses of localized neofascist politics, US neoliberalism, and global corporate hegemony in late-stage capitalism. Moving from the European postwar avant-garde and Latin American nueva canción to the Japanese New Wave, Beijing Fifth Generation Cinema, and socially conscious hip-hop, this project seeks to theorize musicking as an essentially intermedial form of aesthetic production and suggests that the intermediality of music allows, at once, for its ideological cooption and its consistent, immanent promise of resistance.
I completed my AB in Comparative Literature at Princeton (summa cum laude) and my MPhil in Modern Languages at Oxford (distinction). I joined the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale as a PhD student in 2021 supported by the A. Bartlett Giamatti Fellowship. My published scholarship has appeared in Comparative Literature, MLN, New German Critique, and The German Quarterly, among others.
Outside of my academic work, I maintain an active career as a concertizing pianist. I regularly perform solo recitals in the US and abroad, and I am the pianist and artistic director of the Upton Trio. I have competed in the Maria Canals and Livorno Competitions, and I was a silver medalist at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition as a member of the Trio Adonais.