Research

About My Research

My scholarship considers how performance, as both a theoretical approach and an object of analysis, rewrites geographies and narratives of catastrophe and crisis, particularly as they relate to sexual violence. This research has led to publications in TDR: The Drama Review and Contemporary Black Theatre and Performance (Bloomsbury, 2023). My methods mobilize a nuanced and rigorous investigation of the performing arts as societal intervention. This spring, I successfully defended my dissertation, titled “Listening Incommensurably: Reckoning with Sexual Violence through Critical Geographic Performance in the Contemporary U.S. and Canada,” on April 2025 with the support and supervision of my advisor, Lilian Mengesha, and my committee members and external readers, Kareem Khubchandani, Heather Nathans, and Daphne Brooks; my project was awarded the Burnim Prize in Scholarly Excellence in Drama and was supported by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), through which I was a national fellow, and Tisch Library. I ask how artists including Nina Simone, Inuk throat-singer Tanya Tagaq, and visual artist Nona Faustine resist, or refuse and complicate, flattened narratives of sexual violence in order to encourage a method of spectatorship I term listening as incommensurable practice. I analyze these artists through a range of archival and creative sources, including concert recordings, legal documents, program notes, music videos, government-issued literature, film, photography, and autofiction. Following Black studies scholars, I argue that songs are maps that reveal fugitive, embodied, and interrogative navigations of space. Tracing specific genealogies of their sites’ histories and their performance traditions, I illustrate how Simone, Tagaq, and Faustine use their bodies to intervene in dominant histories of place, interrogate systems of power, and imagine more expansive ways of navigating land and narrating violation.

Featured Image: An excerpt of the first chapter of my dissertation was published this year as part of TDR‘s annual graduate student essay contest. You can read it here.

Selected Conference Presentations

See “CV” or “Writing” tabs for fellowships and awards.

American Studies Association Annual Conference

• Paper: “Performing Contention: Tanya Tagaq Questions Sites of Reconciliation;” Working Group: Unruly Aesthetics; Fall 2025 (Accepted)

American Society for Theatre Research Annual Conference

• Paper: “Nona Faustine Resounds New York: Black Feminist Critical Geographic Performance through Sound and Stillness;” Working Group: Black Feminist Cartographies of Time; Fall 2024

• Paper: “(Re)memory and Performance Along New Orleans’ Lafitte Greenway;” Working Group: Navigating the River; Fall 2020

UC-Berkeley Graduate Student Black Geographies Conference

• Presentation/Paper Title: “The Black Geographies of Nina Simone: Song as Spatial Critique;” Panel: Black Sound; Spring 2023

Tufts Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies Graduate Student Research Symposium

• Presentation/Paper Title: “Against the Individualist Grammar of Catastrophe;” Spring 2023

Tufts Indigenous Studies Symposium

• Presentation/Paper Title: “‘None of Us Are Sacrifice Zones:’ Indigenous Women’s Land Listening and Water Work;” Spring 2022

UCLA Theatre and Performance Studies Graduate Student Conference

• Paper: “‘In the Wake’ of the Ohio River: Unsettling North and South;” Working Group: Race, Embodiment, and Historiography; Spring 2021

Mid-America Theatre Conference

• Emerging Undergraduate Scholar; Presentation/Paper Title: “Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Beyoncé Write Movement, Memory, and the South;” Spring 2019