My research examines the politics and aesthetics of climate change and energy transition. Why do we still burn fossil fuels, despite all we know about climate change? How might we build post-fossil futures? What light does cultural studies shed on the prospects for climate and energy justice?
While at Tokyo College, I am conducting research for a book on “the anti-politics of climate change.” I investigate how common ways of representing climate change’s causes, effects, and solutions obscure the political conflicts at the heart of the issue: between social classes, values, and visions of the future. These conflicts tend to be suppressed in both the technocratic and populist approaches to climate change that have become dominant in the twenty-first century. I suggest we read politics back into climate by considering each step in the production of climate change—from energy generation to climate modeling—as a site of political struggle. Focusing on North America and Asia, I examine the politics of extreme weather attribution, climate litigation, disaster photography, and more, using analytical methods from cultural studies and political theory.
Additionally, my research covers the cultural politics of renewable energy transitions, Marxism, environmental justice, labor movements, just transition, and contemporary literature and film.
2025-2028 Postdoctoral Fellow at Tokyo College, University of Tokyo
2023-2025 Lecturer in the Center for Environmental Studies, Rice University
2016-2022 Doctoral Student in the Literature Program, Duke University
Renewable Societies: Energy Transitions and Life after Fossil Fuels, Co-edited with Imre Szeman, Nikki Luke, and Alevgul Sorman, Bloomsbury Press (forthcoming 2026).
“Who Stands for the Climate? On the Ambivalent Poetics of Contiguity,” In The Futurities of Climate Erasures: Climate Change, Storytelling, and Memorialization, eds. Alex A. Moulton and Dylan M. Harris, Bloomsbury Press (2025).
“The Red and the Green,” New York Review of Books (July 2025).
“Climate Metonyms and the Anti-Politics of Climate Change,” Environment, Space, Place 16, no. 1, (Spring 2025).
Climate Struggle,” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 13 (Fall 2022).
“Flood Inc.,” Dissent (Summer 2022).
“Politicizing Climate,” The Bare Life Review 4 (Spring 2021).
“Introduction: Marxism and Climate Change,” Polygraph 28 (2020). With Claire Ravenscroft.
“Capitalism and Planetary Justice in the ‘Web of Life’: An Interview with Jason W. Moore,” Polygraph 28 (2020). With Michael Gaffney and Claire Ravenscroft.
“Community-based Adaptation (CBA): Adding Conceptual Clarity to the Approach, and Establishing its Principles and Challenges,” Climate and Development 10, no. 7 (2017). With Patrick Kirkby and Saleemul Huq.
