My research opens new avenues of inquiry in modernist studies that are historically broad in scope and theoretically innovative. Drawing on historical materialism, Hegel studies, and the sociology of art, my work reframes the concept of aesthetic autonomy by telling a new story about its literary-historical trajectory within modernist fiction, reassessing its philosophical tensions, and arguing for its centrality to the environmental humanities.

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 market 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. I simultaneously challenge the neglect of aesthetic autonomy typical of dominant strands of literary sociology while granting the market a dynamic role in galvanizing formal innovation that more aesthetically discerning inquiries tend to overlook. 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. Each chapter develops this claim by intervening in an area central to the “new modernist studies”: mass culture, race, political instrumentality, and the contemporary. Taken together, the project argues that to understand modernist fiction’s relation to each of these areas, we must take seriously modernism’s commitment to aesthetic autonomy—and understand just how immanent to the market this commitment can be. Part of the project's third chapter is published in Nonsite: “Mary Ellen Solt: Concretizing 1968." and part of 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, Host Modernism: Novel Aesthetics and the Metabolic Rift, challenges the environmental humanities’ critique of aesthetic autonomy by excavating the ecological meaning of this autonomy in modernist fiction and its afterlives. Developing a new synthesis of eco-Marxism and Hegelian aesthetics, the project explores how modernist assertions of aesthetic autonomy perform a neglected mimetic function: they render sensuously intelligible what ecosocialists theorize as the “metabolic rift”—the misalignment between Earth’s natural equilibria and capitalism’s market-driven social metabolism. In short, the project argues that art’s autonomy comes into its own in modernism as an aspect of this rift. Host Modernism shows how the disfigured organic wholes of modernist novels mimetically “host” aesthetic knowledge of how human autonomy endures even as it is disfigured by capitalism’s parasitic exploitation of the socio-ecological whole on which our planetary future depends. For example, the first chapter reads Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) alongside Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) to demonstrate how this metabolic account of art’s autonomy is key to rethinking postmodernism as a genuine state of post-capitalism and to reconciling ecocriticism’s environmental concerns with the specific kind of knowledge that novels embody.