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I am an Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bilkent University, where I teach in the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas. I earned my PhD in English & American Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. I specialize in nineteenth-century American and transatlantic literature, literature and science, and the environmental humanities.
I am the incoming President-Elect for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Society (beginning 2026), and I also serve as Associate Editor for The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies.
Book Project
My current book project, Aphoristic Science: Ecology, Psychology, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature, argues that a speculative style of writing—which I identify with the open-ended aphorism—undergirds the emergence of new scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century. I trace this style in chapters on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, William James, and W.E.B. Du Bois. More information is available here.
Upcoming Events
July 16, 2025 (Elmira, NY): I gave a lecture at the Center for Mark Twain Studies’s Park Church Summer Lecture Series entitled “Beyond Mental Telegraphy: Twain’s Late Psychological Fiction.” This was during my two-week residence at Quarry Farm as a 2025 Quarry Farm Fellow. A recording is available on YouTube.
January 8–11, 2026 (Toronto, Canada): At the Modern Language Association, I will present the paper “‘Science is very near us’: Dickinson and the Poetics of Science” as part of the Margaret Fuller Society panel. I will also present the paper “Science and Small Forms: Franklin and the Early Modern Aphorism” as part of a roundtable organized by the Society of Early Americanists.
See abstracts from my recent conference presentations here.
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