My name is Vanessa. In 2023, I completed my PhD in English. I am trained in Modern Literature and Critical Theory.

My dissertation, Impossible Art, draws on studies in clinical synesthesia to explore cross-modal works of art and literature from the Modernist period. Check out more on Impossible Art here.

Here’s what makes me different: my approach is always that of aesthetics, which I understand as the study of perception. Following the eighteenth century German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who defines aesthetics as “the science of sensitive knowing,” I see aesthetics as an epistemology. The insight that aesthetics is a method of knowing, guides all my academic activity from reading and research to writing to teaching.