Associate Professor, English
Esoteric Aesthetics
MASS MoCA Immersion
Creativity & Survival
Introduction to Visual Culture
Visions & Voices: American Ethnic Literature & Art
Fundamentals of Literary Studies 1: Reading & Imagination
My research and teaching examine the intersection of embodiment and aesthetics. Animated by feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist methods, my work is especially interested in how writers and artists engage occulted practices and esoteric knowledges to disrupt dominant narratives of individualism, universalism, rationalism, and ableism.
In my courses, I encourage students to regard learning as an ongoing process that allows room for risk and reward, vulnerability and achievement, challenge and ease. I prompt students to view the study of literature, visual art, and new media as a creative act in and of itself. My syllabi feature 20th- and 21st-century authors and artists from a multitude of positionalities. My courses take an immersive approach to the study of literature and art: field trips to local museums, guest lectures, somatic activities, and collaborative course projects are common.
I am currently at work on a book project, tentatively titled, Subtle Bodies: Illness and Esoteric Aesthetics. Exploring a range of twentieth- and twenty-first century literary and visual works, Subtle Bodies places disability and care studies, feminist and queer theory, new materialism and posthumanism, and Black studies into conversation with esoteric practices, such as divination, astrology, tarot, mysticism, dreamwork, and syncretic religion. In chapters on H.D., Leonora Carrington, Zora Neale Hurston, Djuna Barnes, Clarice Lispector, Audre Lorde, Deana Lawson, Johanna Hedva, Carolyn Lazard, and CAConrad, I show writers and artists make use of esoteric aesthetics to represent embodiment in the throes of bodily, psychic, and social ills. Esoteric aesthetics, I argue, can shapeshift encounters with ableism and refute rigid rubrics of health. Through an imaginative take on the notion of the “subtle body” — an ancient concept that denotes the metaphysical energies that exist alongside the physical body within a number of spiritual traditions — this book demonstrates how esoteric aesthetics conjure otherwise worlds by guiding our perceptions and senses toward the inchoate power of the liminal realm. If structures of domination and supremacy rooted in enlightenment logics of whiteness and colonial patriarchy have long tried to make femme, queer, and of color bodies insignificant, small, and ill, Subtle Bodies underscores how esoteric aesthetics reveal an impulse to recast subtlety as a radical access point to worlds beyond our immediate purview.
My writing has appeared in such places as Modernist Cultures, The Brooklyn Rail, Women & Performance, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, Public Books, ASAP/J, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Literature and History. My research has been supported by awards from the National Endowment of the Humanities (2023), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (2022), Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center (2020-2022), Massachusetts Cultural Council (2021), and the NEA-funded Artist Impact Coalition (2021).
I am the co-creator of CARE SYLLABUS—a public humanities and arts project developed in collaboration with MASS MoCA.
“In Conversation: Johanna Hedva with Victoria Papa,” The Brooklyn Rail (2025)
“Queer Kinship among the Stars: H.D., Silvia Dobson, and Astrology,” Modernism/modernity Print+ (2024)
“Beyond Care,” The Brooklyn Rail (2024)
“Permission to Wonder: The Palimpsestic Interplay of H.D. and Freud,” Modernist Cultures (2023)
“Interfacing Grief: Haptic Autotheory & Performance as Afterlife in Anne Carson’s Nox,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2022)
“Care and the Contingencies of Critique,” ASAP/J (2021)
“Clean, Original, Primitive”: Sexual Radicalism, Race Consciousness, and the Case of Harlem’s Queers,” Modernism/modernity Print+ (2021)
“The Art of Care: Susannah Cahalan on Madness, Diagnosis, and COVID-19,” Public Books (2020)
"Embodied Haunting: Aesthetics and the Archive in Toni Morrison's Beloved" in Madness in Black Women's Fictions: Aesthetics of Resistance and the Practice of Diaspora. Ed. Caroline Brown and Johanna Garvey. London: Palgrave Macmillan (2017)
MCLA Professor Reflects on Fellowship at Yale's Beinecke Library (Fall 2022)
Leading Classes, and National Conversations, on Care and the Therapeutic Arts (Spring 2022)
New MCLA/MASS MoCA Collaboration Explores the Meaning of Care (Fall 2020)
MCLA English Professor to Complete Brandeis University Fellowship (Fall 2020)
