Biography
I am a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. I grew up in Dallas, Texas but my family is from Louisiana. It is "always for pleasure" to return to the Crescent City. My dissertation, "Outlyers: Maroons and Marronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature," is informed by my early research interests in the maroons of Southern Louisiana.
Research
My dissertation, "Outlyers: Maroons and Marronage in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literature," reads eighteenth and nineteenth-century fictional maroon narratives from the United States and Caribbean. I argue for the ways in which fiction can function as an archive of the powerful resistance practice of marronage. Organized around four maroon objects–portraits, fetishes, epaulettes and hatchets–"Outlyers" wrestles with the tangible and intangible in maroon narratives to chronicle alternative forms of flight and freedom from Atlantic slavery.
