I write and teach about the literature and culture of eighteenth-century Britain and the British Empire, the environmental humanities, the history of racial capitalism, and gender and sexuality in the early modern period. Across my research and teaching, I join together attention to the specificity of literary forms with an awareness of how histories both shape and denaturalize the present.
I am currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. I was previously an Assistant Professor at Indiana University, Bloomington (2021-23), a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University (2019-21), and an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Rice University Humanities Research Center (2018-19). I completed my PhD in 2018 in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago.
Contact: acturn@gmail.com