About Me
As of July 2025, I am an Assistant Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Amherst College. I wrote my PhD in French at UC Berkeley with a designated emphasis in Film and Media and certificates in Global Urban Humanities; Teaching, Learning, and Higher Education; and Universal Design for Learning (UDL). Between 2023-2025, I was also an adjunct faculty member at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.
As an educator and researcher, I question what it means to come of age in an era where we live to be seen. Adole(sense), set to become my first monograph, examines moments from texts that I consider emblematic of the screen age: those screens include the Photomaton, phone selfies, augmented reality filters, and supernatural elements of texts-as-screen. Analyzing novels and films by Gisèle Pineau, Maïmouna Doucouré, Mati Diop, and Marie NDiaye among others, I argue that screened life does not necessitate a split between the self, body, and image. Instead, I argue that a self-imaging moment triggers a return to the flesh and its senses beyond the visual; this is especially crucial for racialized girls, since photoimaging’s racial biases cleave, flatten, or distort her image. Further, this corporealization happens with the audience via formal methods that emphasize kinesis and viscera. I show how these moments make readers and viewers shiver, become breathless, elicit particular textures, and pique an interest in the body, its limits, and its possibilities in an age where both bodies and texts are existentially complicated by the digital, augmented realities, and artificial intelligence.
I received my MA from Berkeley in 2020 and came into academia by way of an Honors BA in French and History at UT Austin. Before Berkeley, I also held a research internship at l'Université de Paris (Sorbonne-IV), Centre Roland Mousnier. I was in the 2017-2018 cohort for the Teaching Assistant Program in France (aka TAPIF) in Aubervilliers, France. I am thrilled to have received honorable mention from the Ford Foundation in 2023, as well as funding from the Mellon Foundation’s Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective (Critical Digital Pedagogies Group) that same year.
At Cal, I was a Chancellor's Fellow and Gérard Fellow. I was a research assistant for the Universal Design Working Group in 2023, and I also undertook funded research with the Center for Race and Gender. I hold former affiliations with the Berkeley Transformative Justice Group and the Mellon-Berkeley Law and Humanities Symposium. I also won a 2025 summer dissertation grant through the Graduate Division.
More than anything, I'm a very proud first-generation student of Black/Pinay ancestry. I was raised and heat-tested in Texas. I have a penchant for coffee shops, cycling, and distance running. I’m learning how to play chess. Dementia awareness and advising mean a lot to me.