I write on contemporary culture, the environment, and science and am Full Professor of Literature at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. Until August 2025, I was Mody C. Boatright Regents Professor in American and English Literature at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’m completing two books: Our Bodies, Our Climate uncovers what happens when climate crisis puts pressure on reproduction. Girl Striving is a memoir in essays that opens up underexplored dimensions of class in America through my experiences of girliness, place, dance, and books.

My books include Infowhelm: Environmental Art & Literature in an Age of Data (2020) and Ecosickness in Contemporary U.S. Fiction: Environment and Affect (2014). Infowhelm was a finalist for the 2022 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) Book Award and the 2021 ASLE-UK Ireland Book Prize. Ecosickness won the 2015 Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize and was shortlisted for the 2014 British Society for Literature and Science (BSLS) Book Prize. My research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, Whiting Foundation, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah, UT Austin, and Stanford University. From 2023-2025, I was a Mellon New Directions Fellow training in demography, reproductive health, and climate change at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

Recent academic articles appear in Critical Inquiry, CR: The New Centennial Review, New Literary History, Environmental Humanities, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, and several edited collections. You can find my public writing in USA Today, The New York Review, Sierra Magazine, Dirt, Avidly, Yes! Magazine, LitHub, Public Books, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

I’m committed to building the environmental humanities. To that end, I co-founded Planet Texas 2050, UT Austin’s inaugural grand research challenge focused on equitable climate resilience, and I was the faculty chair in 2019-20. I served on the transportation advisory group for the City of Austin’s first Climate Equity Plan from 2019-2021 and on CoA’s Joint Sustainability Commission from 2022-2025.

I teach and advise students in the areas of contemporary US literature and culture, environmental humanities, medical humanities, science studies, affect theory, creative nonfiction, data and culture, race and ethnic studies, and public humanities. As a first-generation, low-income (FGLI) college student, I’m especially eager to promote the learning and growth of students traditionally underserved in higher ed.