My work is focused on the awe expressed and provoked by literature and visual art.
Though I’m interested in the concept of the sublime, the term most often assigned to the kind of aesthetic greatness (in arts of all kinds, including literary) that provokes awe, I am more interested in shared wonder, revelation, and communal joy in the immanent than the more individualistic grandeur and terror in transcendent awe that is connoted by the traditional Romantic notion of the sublime.
I research the literary practices of Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, the environmentalist nature writing of those like Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, as well as the work of contemporary poets like Ross Gay. My research uses religious as well as literary critical frameworks, including ecotheology and ecofeminism. Through my research, I understand these writers’ works as revelatory, spiritual, or even religious practices that connect communities, build political movements, and actively engage with the world in an ongoing attempt to understand and revel in its mysteries.
I built this website as a part of my work as the 2024 Slocum Digital Scholarship Fellow at Haverford College. The website contains my research as well as the experiential learning I undertook over the course of the internship through site visits and art-making. This work of digital scholarship, particularly the bibliography and notes on sources included in the “Sources” section of the website, are the beginnings of the more focused English thesis work I will complete in the 2024-2025 academic year, my final year at Haverford.
