I am the author of The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject (2014), which is published by Fordham University Press under its Commonalities series. In December 2015, the book was awarded the MLA 23rd Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for the Best Book in French and Francophone Studies.
My second monograph (in French), L’existence prépositionnelle, was published by Galilée in February 2019 under its La Philosophie en effet series. In September 2019, I gave a talk on this at NYU’s La Maison Française. An expanded English version is currently in the works.
Living on after Failure, my third monograph, is forthcoming with Duke University Press. I have given talks on this project at Yale, Chicago, Cornell, Princeton, Duke, Penn, and Penn State. This project was also supported by a National Humanities Center fellowship in 2022/23. A sense of what this project looks like can be gleaned from this piece on drifting in Jenny Diski’s Skating to Antarctica that I wrote for differences’ inaugural online forum for critical prose.
In 2021, Duke University Press also published The Deconstruction of Sex (with an Afterword by Claire Colebrook) that I did with Jean-Luc Nancy. The original French version will be published by Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre under the Collège International de Philosophie collection.
I am in the midst of completing Touching Literature, or the Experience of the Limit, which has been contracted with Cornell University Press. Meanwhile, I am also embarking on two new book projects: one on World Literature; another on the Asian figure.
Other than the above book projects, I have also published articles in journals including diacritics, MLN, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Theory, Philosophy East & West, Cultural Critique, Theory & Event, and Cultural Politics.
I received my Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2012, having written my doctoral dissertation under the direction of Dominick LaCapra, Timothy Murray, Jonathan Culler, and the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. I then served as Postdoctoral Research Fellow during the 2012-13 academic year at the Society for the Humanities also at Cornell, and continued as Visiting Scholar at the Society for 2013-14. Following that, I was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship for 2014-15 at the Center for the Humanities at Tufts University, where I was also affiliated with the Department of Romance Languages (French), and taught the course Introduction to Contemporary French Thought for the department in the spring of 2015. In 2015, I received the prestigious Newton International Fellowship awarded by the Royal Society and the British Academy for the Humanities and the Social Sciences for my work on "prepositional existence" in French and German thought. During the term of my fellowship (2015-17), I was hosted by the Department of French at the University of Cambridge. In May 2017, I joined the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore as President's Assistant Professor of Literature, an appointment made under the university's targeted hire program. I received my promotion to Associate Professor (with tenure) in Oct 2021. I begin my appointment as Full Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University in August 2024.
In the course of my studies, I have also studied under a host of other amazing teachers: Verena Andermatt Conley (while I was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures (French) at Harvard), Samuel Weber (under the Paris Program in Critical Theory), Ian James (at the University of Cambridge), John WP Phillips and Ryan Bishop (at the National University of Singapore). I cannot be more grateful either for the growing list of mentors that have been helping me along my academic trajectory: Françoise Meltzer (Chicago), Philip Armstrong (Ohio State), Martin Crowley (Cambridge), Werner Hamacher (Frankfurt), Georges Van Den Abbeele (UCI), Hugo Azérad (Cambridge), Lee Edelman (Tufts), Eduardo Cadava (Princeton), and Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton).
While my past research has been focused on theory/ continental thought, French literature, Luso-Brazilian literature (especially Clarice Lispector), contemporary political thought, East-West comparative philosophy, I am lately invested in more recent affect theory, “autotheory,” “postcritique,” World Literature theories, contemporary Anglo-American literature (Ali Smith, Sally Rooney, Rachel Cusk, Kate Zambreno, Yiyun Li, JM Coetzee, Julian Barnes), and questions of race.