Editorial Work

Bridging my monographs are a number of editorial projects, including a special issue of Post45 on “Ambivalent Criticism” (with Tina Post), a Contemporaries cluster on “Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” (with Connor Bennett), a special issue of Television & New Media on “Rape, Genre, and TV after #MeToo,” and a forthcoming volume on New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions (SUNY Press, with Erin Spampinato and Doreen Thierauf). I am also Editor of ASAP/Review, where I am particularly committed to boosting the voices of graduate students and emerging scholars. You can also download my CV.

“Ambivalent Criticism” (special issue of Post45, co-edited with tina Post, 2022)

This special issue doesn't propose Ambivalent Criticism™. Instead, this issue forwards essays that reflect on a style in which we already do criticism — a style we are calling ambivalent — in order to invite a conversation about its political and hermeneutic affordances. We realize that the phrase "ambivalent criticism" is deceptively simple: neither ambivalence nor criticism is a straightforward affair. Ambivalence might inhere in our objects, ourselves, or our (inter)disciplines. Criticism might name any number of scholarly interventions, with any number of objects or scales of reform in mind. Therefore, we offer more provocation than fiat through the four central propositions we advance in this introduction: 1) that the so-called method wars are, at their core, about the dispositional differences through which critics approach their objects, 2) that naming this affective underpinning might provide a way out of their necessarily endless cycling, 3) that the increasing precarization of our profession has promoted ambivalence as a foundational disposition (even if evident, for some, only in its disavowal), especially for those of us in post-1945 cultural studies who are in the business of theorizing an ongoing historical situation we cannot step outside of, and 4) that a greater acceptance of the position of critical ambivalence might yield better fruits for our fields. In our afterword to this special issue, we lay out some of the central questions over which ambivalence has converged in the historical present, particularly around the necessarily ambivalent sites of "openness.

“Rape, Genre, and TV after #MeToo” (Special Issue of Television & New Media, 2024)

This special issue articulates the importance of genre for understanding shifting affective and political norms related to sexual violence. Recent TV from the U.S. and the U.K. has worked to expand the public’s understanding of what counts in the genre of rape, bringing into view less discussed harms like nonconsensual condom removal. At the same time, public discussions of rape have put pressure on the conventions of genres, including the genres explored in this special issue: the procedural, stand-up comedy, the Western, and the situation comedy. My own contribution to the special issue considers how Mare of Easttown figures a social environment that is both city and family at once, making it impossible to disentangle stranger rape and forms of acquaintance, date, or intimate partner rape—and therefore to locate the “problem” of rape as one of crimes to be solved by the police; or of ordinary heterosexuality, requiring more radical cultural transformation. Completing filming after the summer 2020 resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the role of the police is further compromised in Mare of Easttown. I read the show’s episodic anxieties—its increasingly unrealistic plot developments that push at the borders of each episode in order to keep them open—as managing these ambivalences: between stranger and intimate rape; between “crime” and “the family”; between the public and the private; between trust in law enforcement and critique.

“Minimalisms Now: Race, Affect, Aesthetics” (Contemporaries Cluster)

Less is more. Unclutter the mind. Spark joy. What are the forms, styles, and genres of minimalism today? What is their relation to the heyday of minimalist sculpture, music, literature, and architecture in the 1960s through 1980s? Who are the practitioners of minimalism, and how are various minimalisms gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed? And under what social, political, and economic conditions are these practitioners drawn to minimalism now? Recent scholarship in queer of color critique has helped both to situate the whiteness and maleness of minimalism’s historical allure and to theorize how a minimal performance of affect might be a counterhegemonic practice for people of color, whether in what Xine Yao has called “unfeeling,” Tina Post has identified as “black inexpression,” or Sunny Xiang has named “Asian inscrutability.” How should we theorize the relation between stripped-down vocabularies and forms (such as flash fiction or the Tweet) and stripped-down emotional repertoires (such as deadpan and flat affect)? What are the racial and sexual affordances of the minimal today? This cluster explores these questions in a range of media from the 21st century.

New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions (SUNY Press, under contract)

This edited volume advances a new generation of writing in a long genealogy of feminists who grounded their critiques of violence in literary criticism. Literary forms of knowing and cultural forms of intervention are increasingly urgent in a political landscape in which the common response to sexual violence has been an appeal to the state, whether carceral solutions advocated by some in #MeToo, or educational approaches led by national public health organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Through humanistic methods and objects, the contributors to this volume envision an abolitionist feminist politics that transforms what has come to be called a “rape culture”—by re-committing to “culture” itself as the terrain of political contest. These humanistic insights transform the categories and keywords of sexual violence analysis, providing a more transnational approach and internationalist forms of solidarity; a focus on linking different forms of harm under a common understanding of social structure; and a method aimed less at adjudicating whether events have happened in the past and more at preventing their re-appearance in the future.