I am the Associate Director at the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. My work examines the relationship between performance, technology, and body politics through multimedia performance art and aesthetic activism in the 20th and 21st centuries. My dissertation (Musicology, University of Pennsylvania, 2018) demonstrated how the 1980s performance art of Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and Yoko Ono participated in historic shifts concerning the circulation and industrialization of information among new digital media, the production of healthy and sick bodies during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the political fictions of gender and sexuality within the Feminist Sex Wars.

I am currently working on a monograph Bio-Pop: Laurie Anderson, Technobodies, and Aesthetic Activism, which interrogates the performative, sonic, and technological interventions of Laurie Anderson’s multimedia performance art and demonstrates how her aesthetic activism critically re-interprets the modes by which media, technologies, and bodies have been understood and classified within governmental institutions, public health organizations, and the popular sensorium.

My writing has been published in Feminist Review, the Routledge Companion to Popular Music and Gender, Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions, the International Association for Popular Music—United States blog, Sonic Circulations, Title Magazine, and Present Tense Pamphlets.

I am also interested in developing creative spaces for hands-on research and public-facing scholarship. I am the co-founder, alongside Roksana Filipowska, of Listening (to) Cyborgs: A Media Archaeology Workshop on Sound Technologies and I host the FQTS Center podcast Gender Jawn. As a performer, I work with voice processing tools and other sound technologies, crudely edited video, and I draw from opera, art song, and contemporary vocal music traditions. I have appeared as my own clone, a submissive masc-4-masc daddy, an abstract dandelion powered by fans, and a 19th-century Irish immigrant sex worker. As an extension of my research practice, I have performed at Vox Populi, Slought, the Biello Martin Studio, the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art Incubation Series, Maas Garden, and Fringe Arts Scratch Night.