Marissa is a literary scholar and science writer who currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship with the American Association of University Women. Her book project Incognita: A Portrait of Antarctica is a work of narrative nonfiction that combines scientific and natural history with current ecological, atmospheric, and geophysical findings to offer a journey across the continent. Marissa’s goal is to produce a rigorously-researched book that will capture the imagination of curious readers, drawing them into the threatened world of the Antarctic and its power to transform our planet.

Marissa earned a PhD in English Literature from Harvard University in May 2019 and was an Environmental Fellow with Harvard's Center for the Environment from 2019-2021. Her academic research focuses on the visual arts and environmental thought in nineteenth-century American literature and transatlantic Romanticism. Her most recent panel talks at the ALA, ACLA, and MLA have discussed architectural tropes in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Frost, and John Clare. Her essays for general audience, on these and other topics, can be found at Nautilus, Atlas Obscura, and The Paris Review Online among other places.

She holds a BA from Yale University in Comparative Literature with certificates in Spanish and German.