I am a Macquarie University Research Fellow, working on American literature and the development of psychiatry in the twentieth century. I completed my PhD in English at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge in 2022, which I am currently revising as a monograph entitled 'Poetic Explanations: Modern Poetry and its Scientific Study'.

Entitled 'Adapting the Psyche: American Psychiatry, Modern Literature and the Origins of Mental Health', my MQRF project examines the relationship between modern literature, psychiatry and the epistemology and politics of the 'mental hygiene' movement. It tracks the role of aesthetic thinking in the development of mental hygiene psychiatry, from Clifford Whittingham Beers’s ‘A Mind that Found Itself’ and his Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison’s dream of an antiracist psychiatry and the Lafargue Clinic in Harlem. In so doing, I seek to historicise certain political and epistemic features of our contemporary 'mental health' discourse.

My work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review, Psychoanalysis and History, S: Journal for the Circle of Lacanian Ideology Critique and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, I am the author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman and Littlefield).