I am interested in spaces of gathering and study. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve co-organized learning experiments—Place Settings, the Library of Study, the Oakland Summer School, and There Will Always Be Soup—in Los Angeles, New York, and the Bay Area. My current writing focuses on histories of radical education and practices of collective study in and beyond institutions.
I’ve taught courses on media studies, film, contemporary literature, radical pedagogies, and experimental learning at Deep Springs College, Tidelines Institute, Bard College, Harvard University, and in many community settings.
I am currently an assistant professor of English at Princeton University.
After School (book in progress)
After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education turns to experiments in study outside and on the edges of institutions from the 1920s to the present—projects like Commonwealth College, Augusta Savage’s salons and basement art school, the California Labor School, junk art workshops in Watts, student-led experimental colleges, the Black Panthers’ Oakland Community School, and more—to think about practices of convening and hosting learning beyond traditional schools and universities.
Place Settings Los Angeles, CA (2024—present)
Place Settings is site-specific lecture series that invites artists, writers, and academics to give talks prompted by different locations in and around Los Angeles, including film sets and infrastructural sites. I co-organized the series for two years with Anya Ventura, who continues to run the project.
The Library of Study Brooklyn, NY (2020-2023)
A collective project, the Library of Study began as a lending library in Fort Greene Park, Brooklyn, during the pandemic. Over three years, the library hosted study groups, poetry readings, talks, and gatherings of radical libraries in parks and community spaces around New York City.
Study and Speculative Practice graduate seminar
“This seminar will consider practices of “study” and collective forms of learning within, on the edges of, and beyond traditional education. We will engage with thinkers and artists who speculate, theorize, and enact study after school, opening conversations about social architectures for learning, radical pedagogies, and the (under)commons. We will turn to different forms of media—course catalogs, posters, films, books, and more—generated and studied within these experiments, asking: How do media and study shape one another? The course will be a space for collective thinking about our pedagogies and practices of study in and out of the classroom.”
Recent courses:
Study and Speculative Practice (Princeton, 2026)
Introduction to Media Studies (Princeton, 2026)
Language and Thinking (Bard College, 2024)
Freedom Dreams, Otherwise Worlds (Tidelines, 2021)
Radical Education (Harvard, 2021)
Reimagining Education (Deep Springs College, 2019)
Please reach out for course syllabi or materials!
The Oakland Summer School Oakland, CA (2018-2020)
Over two years, the Oakland Summer School hosted gatherings in bookstores and study groups around the Bay Area on themes like “crisis//liberation” and “movement//memory.” The school was an autonomous and horizontal project, using the available resources to create spaces for study.
Writing:
“A Poetics of Habitation: On Renee Gladman,” May (2024)
“Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works,” e-flux (2023)
“Fracture and Assembly: On Lizzie Borden’s Regrouping,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)
“Thinking in Ruins: On the Llano del Rio Experiment,” Los Angeles Review of Books (2023)
“Augusta Savage’s Invitation to Study,” Social Text (2020)