Education
PhD and MA, Princeton University
MSt, University of Oxford
BA, Columbia College of Columbia University
On Teaching Leave for AY 2025–26
Selected Publications
Books
Literature as Sound Studiesco-edited with yasser elhariry, Bloomsbury, July 2025.
On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking through Synesthesia, Fordham UP, January 2025.
Unknown Soldiersby Väinö Linna, Penguin Classics, 2015 (translator from the Finnish).
Some recent articles & reviews
"Saussure and Synaesthesia," The Bloomsbury Handbook of Saussure edited by John E. Joseph, Bloomsbury, July 2025."
"The Other Synaesthesia by Susan Bernstein," MLN (Comparative Literature) 138.5(Dec 2023): 1598-1601.
“Keeping Quiet in Tove Jansson’s Fair Play,” Common Knowledge 28.2(2022): 198-205.
“Incipit: On Poetry and Crisis,” with Thomas C. Connolly, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 50.1-2 (Fall-Winter 2021-2022): 1-49.
“Vers le vers véridique : poésie et vérité chez Mallarmé,” Fabula LhT Issue Nº24: Toucher au « vrai » : l’intelligence de la poésie ed. Annick Ettlin and Jan Baetens. Nov 2020.
“Correspondances : La couleur des voyelles chez Lévi-Strauss, Jakobson, Rimbaud et Banville,” Parade Sauvage 30 (2019): 121-142.
“Sensuous Linguistics: On Saussure’s Synesthesia,” New Literary History 50.1 (2019): 23-42. Winner of the 2018 Ralph Cohen Prize
- poetry & poetics
- 19th-century French literature
- translation
- literary theory, esp. structuralism
- history of linguistics
- Finnish literature
I am interested in poetics and linguistics, literary theory (particularly structuralism), and the history of science: subjects I investigate primarily in texts drawn from post-revolutionary France. My first book On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking through Synesthesia appeared in January 2025 in the Verbal Arts Series of Fordham University Press. It asks why poets and scientists of the nineteenth century began imputing colors and brightnesses to vowels and studies how these discourses were valorized and invalidated as synesthesia came to be constituted as modern scientific object. Reading the literary and scientific histories together, I suggest how synesthesia more subtly construed might be seen to inflect many arts and sciences of modernity.
I am also an active translator from Finnish and French, most notably of Väinö Linna’s Unknown Soldiers (Penguin Classics, 2015), and I am also co-editor, with yasser elhariry, of the collected volume Literature as Sound Studies (Bloomsbury, July 2025). I am currently at work on a second monograph that examines the intextricability of anatomy (feet, dactyls, enjambments…) from poetic terminology. I warmly welcome inquiries from students of all levels and departments whose curiosity is sparked by something I have written here.
