ABOUT

I am a scholar of modernist and contemporary literature, specialising in poetry, ecocriticism, and the intersections between environmental humanities, philosophy of language, and religious thought. My work examines how literary form responds to conditions of uncertainty, loss, and ungraspability, with particular attention to the limits of language, representation, and human-centred ways of knowing.

I work primarily on modernist and contemporary writing in English, with a focus on American poetry, and I also engage Brazilian literature and translation as part of a broader transnational approach to poetic form, ecology, and linguistic experimentation. My research brings literary analysis into dialogue with ecocritical theory, new materialism, and mystical traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Christian negative theology, and Taoism. Across my work, I am interested in how poetry engages vulnerability and relationality not only through presence and materiality, but also through silence, negation, and formal restraint.

Research Trajectory

My doctoral research at the University of Surrey formed the basis of my first monograph, The Zen of Ecopoetics: Cosmological Imaginations in Modernist American Poetry (Routledge, 2023), shortlisted for the 2025 ASLE–UKI Book Prize. The book examines how poets including William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings draw on Zen Buddhism and related East Asian philosophical traditions to rethink relations between self, language, and the more-than-human world. Challenging accounts of modernist poetry that privilege secular rationalism, the study shows how materialist and spiritual concerns coexist within poetic form, reframing environmental thinking as both an ontological and an ethical practice.

Conceptually, my research emerges from sustained engagement with new materialist and posthumanist ecocriticism. While these approaches have been central to decentring the human and foregrounding ecological relationality, my more recent work responds to what I see as their relative under-attention to absence, negation, and linguistic limit. In contexts marked by ecological, historical, and existential pressure, affirmative models of material presence can struggle to account for forms of vulnerability that resist articulation.

Current Research

My current project, The Ineffable Word: Absence and Negation in Modernist and Contemporary American Ecopoetics, is a monograph in preparation. It explores how poets use formal practices such as ellipsis, fragmentation, omission, and silence to engage experiences that exceed descriptive language, including ecological loss, epistemic uncertainty, and ontological vulnerability. Bringing ecocriticism and philosophy of language into dialogue with apophatic traditions, particularly Christian negative theology, Zen Buddhism, and Taoism, the project approaches negation not as a failure of language but as a mode of ethical and contemplative attention. It examines how poetic form registers planetary vulnerability without resolving it into narratives of mastery, optimism, or despair, and is informed by emerging debates in negative ecology and apophatic materialism.

Collaboration and Public Engagement

Alongside my monograph work, I am actively involved in collaborative and interdisciplinary research cultures. I am currently co-editing a special issue of Forum for Modern Language Studies on silence and its religious roots in modernist literature, and I have contributed to collaborative research projects in environmental humanities through postdoctoral appointments at the School of Advanced Study, University of London and Lancaster University.

I am committed to public-facing scholarship and editorial work that brings literary research into dialogue with wider cultural, ethical, and environmental questions, including through curated publications, exhibitions, workshops, and interdisciplinary events.