Klapper Hall, Room 614
718-997-4675
[email protected]
You can find my short CV here.
Research Interests
Nineteenth-century literature and material culture; domestic realism; marriage plot; ethics of care; disability studies; decorative arts; noncanonical writers; aestheticism; women’s writing; cultural studies; late-Victorian literature and culture; feminism and canon revision.
Educational Background
Ph.D., Cornell University 1996
M.A., Cornell University 1993
B.A., Brown University 1990
Teaching Interests
I often teach MA or senior seminar courses on disability studies and feminist theory, using 19th century British texts as case studies. It’s fascinating to see how ideas about the body and gender changed over the centuries, and how Victorian writers were able to access alternative models for understanding caregiving and suffering. I’m also interested in the changing ways feminist critics have understood such central texts as Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, from expressions of women’s rage to delineations of women’s entrapment, and how race has or has not been part of those conversations. I often teach a seminar on Jane Austen, who helped invent the modern novel form and placed women’s experiences and the marriage plot at its center; we talk about narrative form, the uses of satire, and the fraught global politics of her era. Additionally, I”m very interested in Victorian women writers who have not been widely read, and I try to include at least one of these relatively obscure texts in my classes, so that students can have the pleasure of discovering someone and writing on that topic in a way that feels fresh and important.
Awards & Fellowships
Winner, Literary Encylopedia Book Award for Communities of Care, 2021
Honorable Mention for Best Book of the Year, NAVSA, for Communities of Care, 2021
Book Completion Award, CUNY, 2019-2020
Rockefeller Fellowship at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton, 2018-2019
Romance’s Rival, Winner of Best Book of the Year, NAVSA, 2016
Romance’s Rival selected as one of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles for 2016
Winner: Honorable Mention for Best Article of 2015, Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies for “Familiar Marriage: Cousin Love in Mansfield Park and Wuthering Heights”
Selected Publications
Books
Communities of Care: The Social Ethics of Victorian Fiction, Princeton University Press, 2021.
Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage and Victorian Fiction, Oxford University Press, 2016. Winner: Best Book of 2016, North American Victorian Studies Association.
Novel Craft: Fiction and the Victorian Domestic Handicraft, Oxford University Press, 2011.
The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. Co-edited collection, with Kathy A. Psomiades, Duke University.
Selected Edited Collections
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, co-ed. Dennis Denisoff and Talia Schaffer, Routledge, 2019.
“Extending Families”: special issue of Victorian Review, 39:2 (2013). Co-edited with Kelly Hager (Simmons College).
Literature and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Addison-Wesley Longman & Company, 2006. Edited, selected, and annotated 700-pp. teaching anthology.
The History of Sir Richard Calmady, by Lucas Malet, Birmingham University Press, 2003. Edited, wrote introduction and notes.
