My research explores how modernist and contemporary Anglo-American literature makes explicit what kinds of freedom, or autonomy, are possible within capitalism. Across two book projects in progress, I trace how the modernist commitment to aesthetic autonomy responds to the spread of markets and ecological crises. These book projects are interdisciplinary. Bringing modernist studies into conversation with philosophical aesthetics, political economy, and ecological theory, they explore what modernist autonomy has meant and why it matters today. While many modernism scholars treat aesthetic autonomy as an illusion to be demystified, my approach is different. I understand this autonomy not as an author’s sociological freedom to do what they want, but rather as a quality internal to the literary work itself: its sense of unity, and the way it sets its own rules—its self-legislation. In turn, my book projects approach modernism as a long modernism: a cultural formation that endures into our present through its struggle to aesthetically embody human freedom in our “age of AI” and deepening climate crisis.

My first book project, The Market Architecture of Modernist Fiction, examines how a distinct strain of Anglo-American modernist fiction has made—and today continues to make—the literary marketplace an aspect of its medium. I develop a new account of how the commitment to aesthetic autonomy gained traction during the fin de siècle and then trace how this commitment continues to manifest within market-exposed fiction across the twentieth century and into our present. While modernist autonomy is often seen as a mystified effort to separate literature from marketized historical contexts, I explore how market-oriented works of fiction can assert their autonomy through their commodification, producing historically grounded meanings in the process. Each of my four chapters demonstrates how works of fiction can transform the market pressures of their conjunctures into aesthetic problems of self-legislating form. Analyzing this “market architecture” of modernist fiction in works as varied as H.G. Wells’s sci-fi novella The Time Machine (1895), Claude McKay’s Afro-diasporic picaresque Banjo (1929), and Jennifer Egan’s sequel novel about the platform economy The Candy House (2022), I show how literary forms deemed contrary to autonomous art can be integral to it. An excerpt from the project's third chapter is published in Nonsite, “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968", and an excerpt from its first chapter is forthcoming as "Market Texture: The Art of Genre Fiction" in the Spring 2026 issue of Modernism/modernity.

My second book project extends this reappraisal of modernist autonomy from the literary marketplace to the environment. Tentatively titled Host Modernism: Novel Aesthetics and the Metabolic Rift, the project challenges ecocriticism’s relative disinterest in the autonomy of art. I argue that the eco-Marxist concept of the “metabolic rift” can clarify the ecological significance of this autonomy from classical literary modernism onward. This “rift” concept names and critiques how capitalism holds value accumulation to be autonomous from natural constraints. I demonstrate how this “rift” concept can be extended from social theory to ecocriticism. For example, a comparative reading of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) examines how each novel aligns its contradictory assertion of autonomy with human freedom’s contradictory determination by the metabolic rift under capitalism. Ultimately, Host Modernism synthesizes Hegelian aesthetics and eco-socialist theory to illuminate how the modernist novel—past and present—can play "host" to the ecological contradictions of capitalism.