About me

I live in rural Ontario on my family’s fruit and vegetable farm, where I handle beekeeping, food safety, and field crews. My research, teaching, and life are oriented around agriculture—not just my daily farm- and bee-work, but also agricultural literature and agriculture in literature, everyone’s experiences of farming and food, and the history of all this. How we think and feel about farming, which exists within the long historical convergence of nature and labour and means how we think and feel about those and even how we think and feel in general, are shaped by specific conditions in the past and present.

I earned my PhD in English Literature and Science and Technology Studies from the University of British Columbia, where I was a Vanier Scholar and Killam Fellow. I taught most recently at UBC, too, courses on poetry, history, and the environment. Currently, I’m revising my dissertation for publication as Whistling at the Plough: The Shared Poetic Infrastructure of Romanticism and Improvement, starting a postdoctoral fellowship at Western University to work on a follow-up book-length project called Working Feeling: Affect, Agriculture, Romanticism, and completing my master beekeeping certificate through Cornell. I hope to use my research as a foundation for sustainable community-building and public education.