UMass Boston

19th Century American Literature and Culture; Women Writers; Environmental Humanities; Age Studies; Print Culture Studies; Feminist and Queer Theory 

MA, PhD Brandeis University
BA, Northwestern University

• "Teaching Moby-Dick in the Anthropocene” in Radical Teacher Vol. 119 (2021).
• "Society to Encourage Studies at Home (in a Pandemic)." Co-authored with Danielle Coriale. (Forthcoming in ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture.)
• "‘Good Mother, Farewell’: Elizabeth Freeman’s Silence and the Stories of Mumbet." The New England Quarterly 92.4 (December 2019): 584-614.
• “Not Feeling Right: Queer Encounters with American Women’s Writing” (forthcoming in Legacy)
• "'Now I Chant Old Age’: Whitman’s Geriatric Vistas.” Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life (Spring 2019). Special issue: "Revisiting the Whitmanian Body at 200."
• Adulthood and Other Fictions: American Literature and the Unmaking of Age (Oxford University Press, 2019).
• “Over the Hill and Out of Sight: Locating Old Age in Nineteenth-Century American Culture.” Common-Place: The Journal of Early American Life 17.1 (Winter 2017).
• “Reading Age Beyond Childhood.” ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture 62.1 (March 2016): 122-127.
• “Louisa May Alcott’s Age.” American Literature 87.3 (September 2015): 517-545.
• Between the Novel and the News: The Emergence of American Women's Writing. University of Virginia Press (University of Virginia Press, 2014).
• “‘May I Never Be a Man’: Melville’s Redburn and the Failure to Come of Age in Young America.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 59.4 (2013): 553-584.
• Profile of Elizabeth Keckley. Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. 29.1 (January 2012).
• “‘Metamorphosis of the Newsboy’: E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand and the Antebellum Story-Paper.” Studies in American Fiction 37.1 (Fall 2010): 29-53. (Winner of the RSAP-ProQuest/RASP Prize for best article on American periodicals published by a pre-tenure scholar in 2010)
• “‘Pretty as Pictures’: Family Photography and Southern Postmemory in Katherine Anne Porter’s ‘Old Mortality.’” Southern Literary Journal 40.2 (Spring 2008): 151-165.
• "Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Yellow Newspaper.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers . 24.1 (June 2007): 72-92.
• Reviews in American Literature, Criticism, American Literary Realism, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

I am working on a new book project tentatively titled "Beach Reading" that charts the emergence of the beach as a cultural institution and site of leisure over the course of the nineteenth century. Though we tend to think of the beach as a realm outside of history and a politics, it was not until the nineteenth century that Americans began to engage with the coastline as a space devoted to contemplation, spiritual renewal, and ecological reverie. The beach is a hybrid realm, where land and water collide with fantasy and politics: a space simultaneously revered as natural and universal but also shaped by corporate developers and marred by racial violence and segregation. This project considers many iterations of the beach, including the first public beaches in the US, the rise of resort and vacation culture, second-home literature, as well as the environmental injustices that delimit access to beaches and clean water. It asks: From whom does the beach provide refuge or community? When did it become the “preferred dream space for the masses,” as one historian calls it?  How have plastic pollution and rising sea levels irrevocably altered the experience and meaning of the ocean and coastal landscapes, upending at last the notion that we can escape ourselves and other people? Beach Reading thus reads the beach itself as a text in order to explore white fantasies of purity, women’s desire for freedom and escape, and the collective will to knowledge and experience. 

Undergraduate

• ENGL 200: Introduction to Literary Studies
• ENGL 202: Six American Authors
• ENGL 205: One Book in the World (Reading the Whale: Moby Dick and its Worlds)
• ENGL 372L: American Women Writers and Culture
• ENGL 379: Literature and Journalism
• ENGL 408: American Romanticism
• ENGL 463: Adulting, or Coming-of-Age in Literature
• ENGL 465: Oceanic Currents in the Literature of the Americas

Graduate

• ENGL 606: Books, Manuscripts, Libraries
• ENGL 651: Nineteenth-Century American Literature
• ENGL 652: American Romanticism
• ENGL 659: Women’s Literature and Feminist Theory