Hi, I'm Becca. I write essays and book reviews for the TLS, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, etc, and I'm a second-going-on-third-year PhD candidate in philosophy at Harvard. In 2017, I was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle's book reviewing prize and a National Magazine Award in the essays/criticism category. My essay "Ladies in Waiting," about women and waiting, is collected in the 2017 Best American Magazine Writing anthology, available here. In obsolete news, I was briefly assistant literary editor of The New Republic, and I have a masters in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge. I graduated from Dartmouth in 2014 with a degree in philosophy & German (and an enduring distaste for fraternities). I live in Somerville MA but I go to New York a lot.
I remain incurably interested in too many things.
In general, I'm interested in narrative, Berlin, mysticism, medieval literature (esp. Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Brabant), noir film and fiction, RuPaul's Drag Race and the history of drag, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Berlin, desire/pleasure/pain, what it means to be a "woman," and Mallomars. As a critic, I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent; I'm especially interested in massive, fin-de-siecle German language novels about the dissolution of the German and Austrian empires. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.
Academically, I have two main areas of interest and one area of secondary interest. Centrally, I'm interested in aesthetics/philosophy of literature and 20th century continental German philosophy, specifically Heidegger. I'm perhaps most interested in what beauty is and how it interacts with other sorts of value. Is beauty pleasant, or is it lacerating? Are we beholden to beauty, or is beauty vulnerable to its audience? Is beauty ever a source of moral value (or vice versa)? Is it ever a source of epistemic value (or vice versa)? Do we have moral obligations to sources of beauty? Epistemic obligations? And so on. I'm also interested in disanalogies and analogies between literature and other sorts of art. Is language a material like other materials? Etc. I also have secondary interests in metaphysics, specifically grounding and explanation: is grounding transitive? Is grounding a form of necessitation? How are weird things like negative existentials and accidental generalizations grounded? My second-year paper integrates these interests; in it, I argue that aesthetic value is sometimes a ground of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) My dissertation will have something to do with Heidegger and literature.
Because I've deleted all social media in the interest of asceticism (and aestheticism, by pun and extension), I will maintain an updated and exhaustive list of writings/news items/ personal curiosities as they're released below. For a curated selection, see the aptly named "selected writing" tab above. Viel Spaß!
I remain incurably interested in too many things.
In general, I'm interested in narrative, Berlin, mysticism, medieval literature (esp. Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch of Brabant), noir film and fiction, RuPaul's Drag Race and the history of drag, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Berlin, desire/pleasure/pain, what it means to be a "woman," and Mallomars. As a critic, I write mostly about feminism and "world literature," especially Eastern European or German language literature with a Jewish bent; I'm especially interested in massive, fin-de-siecle German language novels about the dissolution of the German and Austrian empires. A few authors I especially love are Italo Svevo, Hermann Broch, Muriel Spark, Henry Green, Julio Cortazar, Helen DeWitt, Marie de France, Simone Weil, William Gass, Antal Szerb, Norman Rush, and Javier Marias.
Academically, I have two main areas of interest and one area of secondary interest. Centrally, I'm interested in aesthetics/philosophy of literature and 20th century continental German philosophy, specifically Heidegger. I'm perhaps most interested in what beauty is and how it interacts with other sorts of value. Is beauty pleasant, or is it lacerating? Are we beholden to beauty, or is beauty vulnerable to its audience? Is beauty ever a source of moral value (or vice versa)? Is it ever a source of epistemic value (or vice versa)? Do we have moral obligations to sources of beauty? Epistemic obligations? And so on. I'm also interested in disanalogies and analogies between literature and other sorts of art. Is language a material like other materials? Etc. I also have secondary interests in metaphysics, specifically grounding and explanation: is grounding transitive? Is grounding a form of necessitation? How are weird things like negative existentials and accidental generalizations grounded? My second-year paper integrates these interests; in it, I argue that aesthetic value is sometimes a ground of moral value. (A draft is available upon request.) My dissertation will have something to do with Heidegger and literature.
Because I've deleted all social media in the interest of asceticism (and aestheticism, by pun and extension), I will maintain an updated and exhaustive list of writings/news items/ personal curiosities as they're released below. For a curated selection, see the aptly named "selected writing" tab above. Viel Spaß!
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