I am an M.A. student in English at the University of Notre Dame. My work explores how people come to belong, and what the absence of belonging does to love, motivation, and moral life. I pursue that question in two places: twentieth-century American fiction, chiefly James Baldwin, and developmental and educational psychology, where I study how students read, what moves them to learn, and how belonging shapes moral formation.

I manage Dr. Susan D. Blum’s School Story Lab and am writing two forthcoming entries for the Elgar Encyclopedia of Moral Psychology with Daniel Lapsley. I serve as a graduate teaching assistant for Educational Psychology, teach creative writing workshops at the St. Joseph County Jail, and have designed and taught summer English courses at Bellarmine College Preparatory.

I completed my B.A. in English with Honors at Notre Dame in 2026. My honors thesis, Exhausted Love: Queer Depletion in James Baldwin’s Another Country, received the Department of English Outstanding Honors Thesis Award.

CV

Contact me at mamend@nd.edu

Currently Updated October 2026

Writing “Beyond Refusal and Repair,” for PAMLA in Seattle, and a journal article on queer depletion

Developing a project on the moral psychology of literary reading and moral attention.

Interviewing college students about their reading habits and experiences returning to analog in the age of AI for the School Story Lab

Teaching Educational Psychology at Notre Dame as a graduate TA, and creative writing workshops at the St. Joseph County Jail

Research

My research asks how people come to belong: how we orient ourselves toward others, how we find purpose, and how we decide whether, and when, a place has room for us. I follow those questions through twentieth-century American literature, where queer and interracial intimacy so often breaks down under the pressure of exclusion, and through educational and developmental psychology, where belonging shapes what students read, how they learn, and who they become. 

Belonging

How we orient ourselves toward others

How we find purpose

How we decide if, and when, we belong

What that means for learning, and for queer life

Literature and Queer Theory

Exhausted Love
Honors thesis, 2026

Exhausted Love: Queer Depletion in James Baldwin’s Another Country. Advised by Dr. Sara Marcus. Outstanding Honors Thesis Award, Department of English.

In Another Country, Baldwin’s characters look for love because they are looking for a place, and the society around them refuses one. The thesis calls the result queer depletion: intimacy that spends the self down until the desire to belong collapses into self-destruction. Archival research at the Schomburg Center, Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Baldwin’s former residence was funded by the Franco Institute.

Queer Depletion as a Way of Reading
ASAP seminar paper, Madison, October 2026

Seminar: “The Making and Sustaining of Self and Collective: Forms, Costs, Practices.” Co-convenor; wrote the call for papers.

Building on the thesis, the paper presents queer depletion as a theory for reading queer subjects, one that attends to what the pursuit of belonging costs the characters who undertake it.

Beyond Refusal and Repair
PAMLA, Seattle, November 2026

“Beyond Refusal and Repair: Queer Depletion and the Limits of Queer Theory in Baldwin’s Mid-Century Fiction.”

Carries queer depletion into Giovanni’s Room, sets it against the limits of existing queer theory, and presents new findings from the Beinecke archive. The paper is the basis of a journal article in progress.

Educational Psychology

TL;DR: Why Students Read, or Don’t
School Story Lab, 2025–27

Lab manager; PI Dr. Susan D. Blum.

A survey of 61 college students and follow-up interviews on how students decide whether a reading is worth their time. Due dates and personal interest drive those decisions, and the interviews now follow the richest finding: students’ motivation not to read, and what it reveals about their sense of purpose in a course.

Visit the School Story Lab

Materiality, Embodiment, and Education
School Story Lab, 2026–27

“Understanding the Return to Analog in the Context of AI.”

Interviews on the materials of college learning: laptops and notebooks, paper and screens, bluebooks and oral exams, device bans and AI policies. We ask which tools feel essential to how students learn, how those tools change their attention and participation, and whether students should have a voice in the policies that govern them.

Visit the School Story Lab

Students and Generative AI
Capstone, Institute for Educational Initiatives

Advised by Dr. Matthew Wilsey.

Interviews and a survey on why students choose, or decline, to use generative AI for coursework. The project reads their choices through mindset, motive, and sense of purpose.

More Psychology

Belonging and Moral Formation
Elgar Encyclopedia of Moral Psychology, forthcoming

Lead author, with Daniel Lapsley.

How the need to belong shapes moral development: the communities that claim us teach us whose regard matters, which obligations bind us, and who counts as one of us.

Distributive Justice Reasoning
Elgar Encyclopedia of Moral Psychology, forthcoming

With Daniel Lapsley, lead author.

How people reason about fairness in who should get what, and how that reasoning develops.

Select a project to read more.

Take Part in Research

The School Story Lab is studying how the tools students learn with, from notebooks to laptops to AI, shape attention and participation in college classrooms. If you’re a college student, we’d like to hear from you!

School Story Lab

Paper, laptop, or both? Tell us how you learn.

We are interviewing college students about the materials they learn with, and why some are going back to analog tools in the age of AI.

What we’ll ask about
  • How you take notes: laptop, notebook, tablet, or by hand
  • Reading for class on paper or on screens
  • Phones, laptops, and device bans in class
  • Exams on paper, on laptops, in bluebooks, or out loud
  • How you use AI, and what you think of your professors’ AI policies
What to expect in an interview
  • About 30 minutes
  • Audio-recorded; your identity stays within the lab
  • Skip any question or stop at any time

Take the survey  or  email me to sign up for an interview

Elsewhere

Notre Dame English Website: english.nd.edu/people/graduate-students/maximilian-amend/

Private tutoring: www.mjatutoring.com

Nonprofit: www.artoftheheartmusic.org

News: Notre Dame English (www.english.nd.edu); University of San Francisco (www.usfblogs.usfca.edu)

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