Education 

PhD, Yale University, 2013
MSc, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2006
BS, Georgetown University, 2004

Areas of Specialization 

   • Global Contemporary Literature
   • Theories of Race, Capital, and Empire
   • Transnational American Studies
   • The History of the Present

Recently Taught Courses 

Cultures of Extraction
Postcolonial Literature and Theory
Capitalism and Contemporary Literature
Global Contemporary Literature

Book Projects 

My current book project, which is provisionally titled Two Histories of Extraction, traces the conjoined histories of the extraction of precious metals (silver and gold) and the extraction of energy (biomass and fossil fuels), from the sixteenth century through to the present. These two histories, I contend, evince two fundamental and enduring logics of capital—the ascendance of exchange value, and the imperative of perpetual growth. My argument is primarily theoretical in focus; but Two Histories of Extraction contains a literary studies component—brief and illustrative readings of literary texts. The book’s literary archive will include both historical and contemporary works of poetry, drama, and, especially, fiction—novels such as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), Émile Zola’s Germinal (1885), Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt (1984), C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), and Lydia Kiesling’s Mobility (2023).

My second book, Moments of Capital: World Theory, World Literature, was published by Stanford University Press in 2023. Undertaken at the interface of critical theory and world literature, Moments of Capital sets out to grasp the unity and heterogeneity of global capital in the postcolonial present. I argue that global capital is composed of three synchronous moments: primitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and the "synthetic dispossession" facilitated by financialization and privatization. These moments correspond to distinct economic and political forms, and distinct strands of theory and fiction. Moments of Capital integrates various intellectual traditions—from multiple trajectories of Marxist thought, to Weberian inquiries into the "spirit" of capitalism, to anticolonial accounts of racial depredation—to reveal the concurrent interrelation of the three moments of capital. The book's literary readings, meanwhile, make vivid the uneven texture and experience of capitalist modernity at large. Analyzing formally and thematically diverse novels—works by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Marlon James, Amitav Ghosh, Jennifer Egan, Eugene Lim, Raphael Chirbes, Neel Mukherjee, Pitchaya Sudbanthad, Rachel Kushner, and others—Moments of Capital evinces the different patterns of feeling and consciousness that register, and hypothesize a way beyond, the contradictions of capital. This book develops a new conceptual key for the mapping of contemporary theory, world literature, and global capital itself.

My first book, Security and Terror: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity, was published by the University of California Press in 2018. Security and Terror interweaves two threads. One, the book embeds the conceptual paradigms of security and terror within the five-hundred-year history of European empire and its afterlives—the long, global history of colonial modernity. Two, the book examines how the extant history of colonial modernity, and the dialectic of security and terror that operates therein, is registered and reckoned with in contemporary theory and fiction. 

Selected Publications 

BOOKS
   • Moments of Capital: World Theory, World Literature (Stanford University Press, 2023) *Reviewed in American Literary History, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and Comparative Critical Studies
   • Security and Terror: American Culture and the Long History of Colonial Modernity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018)

   *Reviewed in Times Higher Education

ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
   •  “Extractive Modernity at Large: The Contemporary Novel of Primitive Accumulation,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies (published online December 2021; forthcoming in print)
   • “Literature, Theory, and the Temporalities of Neoliberalism,” in Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature, eds. Stephen Shapiro and Liam Kennedy (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2019)
   • “Historicizing Repression and Ideology,” Mediations, vol. 30, no. 2, August 2017 (special issue on Louis Althusser’s On the Reproduction of Capitalism, Caren Irr, ed.)
   • “‘This Is Our Threnody’: Roberto Bolaño and the History of the Present,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 56, no. 1, January 2015
   • “Occupation against Occupation: Space and Anticolonial Resistance,” Transforming Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 1, April 2014
   • “Security: The Long History,” Journal of American Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, August 2013
   • “‘The Stands Bereft of People’: The Cultural Politics of World Cup Stadia,” Transition 109, October 2012

REVIEWS AND OTHER ESSAYS
   • “Fictions of Capital” (invited contribution to a special PMLA cluster on Hernan Diaz’s novel Trust), PMLA, vol. 138, no. 5 (October 2023)
   • “Liberalism and Critique,” American Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1 (February 2023)
   • “The Art of Neverending Wars,” essay on the exhibition “Theater of Operations: The Gulf Wars 1991 – 2011” (MoMA Ps1), New York Review of Books (online), 15 February 2020
   • “The World-Spanning Humanism of Mohsin Hamid,” The Millions, 12 July 2017
   • “Millennials and the War on Terror,” The Chronicle Review, vol. LXII, no. 5, October 2015
   • “The Crazy: Writing the Iraq War,” The Nation, 29 October 2012
   • “Working Lives in Debt,” Social TextPeriscope, 29 September 2011
   • “‘Days of Infamy’: John Dower’s Cultures of War,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 1 August 2010
   • “The World Cup: Will South Africa Shine?,” Social Text online, June 2010

SELECTED PRESENTATIONS
   • “Two Histories of Extraction,” Historical Materialism Paris, 26 June 2025
   • “Two Histories of Extraction,” annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Montreal, 15 March 2024
   • “Moments of Capital: Realism, Crisis, Totality,” for the seminar “Socially Necessary Labor Time and the Future of Realism,” annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Chicago, 17–19 March 2023
   • “Extractive Modernity at Large,” Historical Materialism conference, SOAS, University of London, 10 November 2019
   • “Security, Terror, and Colonial Modernity,” invited lecture and seminar, the Global South Colloquium, University of Victoria (BC), 31 January 2019
   • “Choc en Retour: The Colonial Origins of Neoliberal Rationality,” annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Universiteit Utrecht, 7 July 2017
   • “Governmentality and Accumulation: Literature, Freedom, and the Temporalities of Neoliberalism,” annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association, Harvard University, 22 March 2016