I am currently Reader in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King's College London. I came to King's in 2011 from the English Department at the University of York, where I was lecturer in Contemporary Literature. I earned my BA in English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and my MA and PhD at Rutgers University. Before taking up my position at York, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Pembroke Center at Brown University.

My recent work centres on what I call 'the microeconomic mode', a dominant 21st-century cultural formation that combines aesthetic strategies of abstraction with narratives focused on extreme circumstance and threats to survival. My monograph The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (Columbia 2018) was awarded the 2019 MLA Matei Calinescu Prize for a distinguished work of scholarship in twentieth or twenty-first century literature and thought and the 2018 Best Monograph Prize from the British Association of Contemporary for Contemporary Studies. Essays related to this project have appeared or are forthcoming in Novel, Social Text and the edited collections Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture and Old and New Media After Katrina.

My previous publications include 'Genres of Neoliberalism', a special issue of Social Text co-edited with Gillian Harkins (2013); the essay collection Theory after 'Theory', co-edited with Derek Attridge (Routledge 2011); and Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Palgrave 2008).