Education

• 2021– | Doctoral Candidate, Graduate School of North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany

• 2015 | Master of Arts, English Language and Literature, The University of Chicago, USA

• 2010 | Bachelor of Arts, English, The University of Pennsylvania, USA

Conference Papers

• “From Superhighway to Hyperreality: The Infrastructure of Astral America.” 11th World Congress of the International American Studies Association; University of Silesia; Katowice, Poland. September 2023.
• “Conspiracies of Infrastructure: Locating the Darkness in Technicolor Noir.” PopMeC Association for US Popular Culture Studies Virtual Conference. September 2023.
• “The Oil Embargo, Fifty Years On: Fueling the (Long) Crisis of American Automobility.” 16th International Graduate Conference; JFK Institute; Freie Universität Berlin; Berlin, DE. June 2023.
• “Interstate Postmodernism: Superhighway Subjects in The Crying of Lot 49.” British Association of American Studies Annual Conference; Keele University; Keele, UK. April 2023.
• “Interstates: Superhighways, California Noir, & the Neoliberal Order, 1956–92.” HCA Spring Academy; Heidelberg Center for American Studies; Heidelberg, DE. March 2023.
• “Neo-Noir’s Strange Loops: Infrastructure and the (Filmic) Past.” Eco-Temporalities & Geo-Politics; Universität zu Köln; Cologne, DE. October 2022.
• “The Case of Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Intellectual Property, Neoliberalism, and Conspiracies of Infrastructure.” International PhD Seminar; Roosevelt Institute for American Studies; Middelburg, NL. May 2022.
• “Zigzagging in the Motor Age: Automobility and Errant Mobility in The Crying of Lot 49.” Converging Narratives: The Personal Meets the National; University of Illinois at Chicago; Chicago, USA. April 2015.
• “Authorities and Authors of Redevelopment: The Language of Black Displacement in Philadelphia.” Intertextuality; University of North Carolina – Wilmington; Wilmington, USA. April 2011.

Professional Experience

• 2022 | Co-organizer, International Graduate Workshop, American Grids: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Housing Energy and Infrastructure, Freie Universität Berlin, 17 June 2022.

• 2014 | Co-organizer, Concussions, Commotions, and Other Aesthetic Disorders, The University of Chicago, November 2014.

Inter-States: Infrastructure in California Noir Fiction & Film, 1956–92

Dissertation in Culture

Mentoring team:
First supervisor: Prof. Frank Kelleter
Second supervisor: Dr. Myka Tucker-Abramson
Third supervisor: Prof. Dr. Martin Lüthe

Inter-States: Infrastructure in California Noir Fiction & Film, 1956–92 argues for the interstate era as an epoch of U.S. American culture. Using a methodology informed by the burgeoning field of humanist infrastructure studies, this dissertation links the proliferation of superhighway infrastructure in the United States to what has been called the “noir tradition” in twentieth-century American culture. The protracted years during which the Interstate Highway System was officially under construction, 1956–1992, witnessed the reemergence and transformation of a popular aesthetic of darkness that had come to mainstream prominence with the film noir of the 1930s–50s. The interstate nurtured fantasies of freedom and adventure that sustained a considerable number of novels, movies, and popular songs about the open road. But it also crystallized a reality of domination that noir narratives have long sought to represent and resist.

Inter-States deploys an infrastructural approach to the study of culture to recover a dialectic noir tradition in the second half of the twentieth century. It has been claimed that the classic era of U.S. American film noir came to an end in the mid-1950s, right as the interstate began to materialize. Meanwhile, the later, postmodern appropriation of noir would feature in the landmark critiques of postmodernism—appearing in the early 1990s, when the interstate was at last declared complete—as an example of the depoliticization of culture in favor of ahistorical pastiche. This study takes the coincidence of these inflection points—between the historical trajectory of the U.S. American noir tradition and that of the full integration of superhighway infrastructure into American life—as an invitation to approach the years 1956–1992 as a cultural-infrastructural epoch. The interstate highway links New Deal liberalism to the neoliberal present, offering an infrastructural case study of how one became the other, all while fleshing out the transition between periodizing categories like New Deal and Neoliberal, Fordism and post-Fordism.

The U.S. American noir tradition in the interstate era can be defined by its engagement with what this study proposes to call inter-states. Inter-states designate spatiotemporal occasions, staged on and through built infrastructure, for symbolic, political, and affective traffic between individuals and the greater American system, or the complex of liberal-capitalist production and mainstream ways of life that was presented as inevitable. The specific inter-states tracked in this study arise from the unique aesthetic, phenomenological, and epistemic affordances of the historically novel superhighway form. As this study shows, cultural actors seized on such inter-states for their counter-hegemonic potential, whereas certain political actors saw in them an opportunity to aestheticize and sublimate the arrangement between state power and capital that a national superhighway network helped to make concrete.

This study demonstrates that the infrastructural form of the automobile superhighway has been co-theorized by politicians, journalists, engineers, and cultural producers across diverse discourses, narrative modes, and aesthetic forms over the twentieth century. The objects examined in the following chapters fall into two categories that make up two ends of a dialogue around superhighway infrastructure: the speeches, images, promotional films, engineering manuals, and architectural manifestos that helped manufacture consent for the interstate highway’s construction; and those fictional narratives within a broad California noir tradition that ask what the rapid introduction of multi-lane, grade-separated superhighway infrastructure into everyday life might mean for aesthetics, society, and politics. The case studies examined in this dissertation represent a cross-section of California noir subgenres: the postmodern conspiracy fiction of Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novella The Crying of Lot 49; Joan Didion’s Hollywood gothic novel Play It as It Lays (1970); the pastiche hardboiled detective cinema of Chinatown (1974) and its comic offspring, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988); and the Black dystopian sci-fi of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993). These texts swerve from the well-known corpus of road narratives to present a materialist vision of the road that is astonishingly dark.

In addition to its claims about U.S. American cultural history, this dissertation sets out to make a methodological intervention in both the burgeoning field of the infrastructural humanities as well as in the broader discipline of cultural studies. It attempts to mobilize the superhighway form—not only its history and reception but its distinctive material features as well—toward the development of an interdisciplinary infrastructural critique. In focusing on the superhighway and its uptake across diverse discourses, narrative modes, and aesthetic forms, this study depicts a long and rich dialogue between the politicians, journalists, engineers, and cultural producers who have co-theorized automobile infrastructure. It is through the reconstruction of this dialogue that the inter-state concept begins to realize its potential as a methodological tool. This dissertation concludes by proposing that a noir infrastructural critique might make valuable contributions to ecocritique, the energy humanities, and other scholarly modes currently grappling with the Anthropocene and its ever more present consequences.

Academic Publications

• 2024 | “From Superhighway to Hyperreality: The Infrastructure of ‘Astral America.’” Review of International American Studies17.1 (Spring/Summer 2024): 139-150

• 2022 | “The Freeway Fix: Infrastructure, Affect, and the Politics and Aesthetics of Distance in Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays.” AmLit – American Literatures 2.1 (2022)

• 2014 | “Nothing Too Private: The Letters of T.S. Eliot Volume 3: 1926-27.” The Journal of Modern Literature 37.4 (Summer 2014): 182-185

• 2012 | “In the Wake of Fair Use: Incest, Citation, and the Legal Legacy of Finnegans Wake.” The Journal of Modern Literature 35.4 (Summer 2012): 56-72