Fields of Interest: European and American avant-garde literary and artistic production, the history of aesthetics, performance theory, dance history, phenomenology, and postcolonial poetry and poetics.

My first book, Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology (Princeton UP, 1999), explores the poetry of Rimbaud, Cendrars, Char, and American performance poets Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson through the lens of cultural studies and the Frankfurt School critique of aesthetic autonomy. My second book, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Harvard UP, 2009), attempts to broach the impasse of constructivist theory--which I construe to be its inability to provide a persuasive account of individual resistance--by focusing on the moving body as a source of agency that both enables and challenges the transmission of congealed cultural meanings. I am currently nursing two new projects, both of which extend my interest in performance but in different ways. A manuscript on francophone Caribbean poetry, Not a Dancing Bear, shows how the works of Césaire, Damas, and Glissant place in question the dominant twentieth-century poetics of surrealist non-referentiality, racial performance, and Heideggerian dwelling. A second manuscript, Aesthetic Intersubjectivity, deploys dance history--in particular, the anti-expressivist works of Steve Paxton and Merce Cunningham--to revise Adorno's account of modernism.

BOOKS:
Poetry at Stake: Lyric Aesthetics and the Challenge of Technology, Princeton University Press (1999).

Agency and Embodiment: performing gestures/producing culture, Harvard University Press (2009).

Migrations of Gesture, University of Minnesota Press (2008), co-edited with Sally Ann Ness.

Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement, Palgrave Macmillan (2009), co-edited with Barrett Watten.