Research

My research includes ongoing work on the surrealist movement, broadly conceived, as well as on histories and practices of experimental writing, art, thought, and organizing.

My current projects include:

I am completing a book on the global reception of surrealism and judgments of value. Titled The Great Surrealist Bargain Basement, this work examines how surrealism has been tangled with, reinvented, refuted, or otherwise appropriated by writers and artists around the world since the movement’s formation over a century ago.

With Anna Watz (Uppsala University, Sweden), I am editing A History of Surrealist Poetry, under contract with Cambridge University Press. The first-ever global history of surrealist poetics, this volume features 33 original chapters, in addition to an introductory essay and an afterword, documenting the geographical range, distribution, and invention (or reinvention) of the poetry and poetics of surrealism over the past century.

I continue to research and write about the work of Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini, and I am particularly interested in how their writing and artwork intersect, as well as in the conceptual underpinnings of their work.

Having collaborated with Stacy Klein on An Alchemy of Living Culture: Collected Writings on Double Edge Theatre (Bloomsbury/Methuen Drama, 2025), I continue to study and draw inspiration from Double Edge Theatre and its artistic ensemble. I am researching and writing about physical training, devised theatre, and embodied resistance, understood both in a performing arts context and more broadly as a strategy for organizing, thinking, and teaching collectively.

Other longer-term research interests include histories and practices of intellectual community, understood as everyday, embodied, and vernacular. This includes but is not limited to print publishing and the circulation of little magazines, broadsides, and zines; reading cultures and the creation of “third spaces”; and collective forms of making.

I am Series Editor of two new book series (please click on the icons for more information):