I am a PhD Candidate at Duke University, working on contemporary literature, pop culture, and fan studies. I also work in the digital humanities, employing computational methodologies.

My dissertation “Somebody’s Story: Character After the Digital” identifies the partly real, partly fictional hybrid character of contemporary fiction as a literary response to the blending of reality and fantasy found in digital culture. As digital spaces change our relationship to fact and fiction, authenticity becomes more important to digitally minded readers. Using traditional close reading and computational analyses of large corpora, this dissertation shows how authors build authenticity through the bodies of their hybrid characters in narratives as varied as autofiction, crime fiction, and fanfiction.