Areas of Expertise
- British literature from the Restoration through the Victorians, historical inquiry as a rhetorical act of nation building, theories of the sublime, methods of marking time, fundamentals of literary analysis and genre
Education
- B.A. in history, University of Hartford (2003)
- B.A. in English, University of Hartford (2003)
- M.A. in English, University of Rhode Island (2008)
- Ph.D. in English, Brandeis University (2015)
What's My Why?
My student-centered classroom encourages students to develop original, interesting and relevant analytical questions about themselves and their relationship to the world. A primary topic of my course discussions is deliberating the value the past holds for the future, and ascertaining ways that citizenship involves strategies of inclusion and exclusion. I encourage students to use their own unique perspectives to help them read literature and to explore the potentials offered by the literary imagination.
Professional Experience
Prior to joining Salve, I served as a Davis Education Foundation Fellow at the University of Hartford. In this role, I focused on designing and implementing strategies for increasing student fluency in the first-year writing program, primarily through the use of exploratory writing. In addition, I formally served as an early career advisor for the Graduate Student Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. In this role, I was able to brainstorm ways of assisting newly-minted Ph.D.s, independent scholars and contingent faculty with maintaining a scholarly identity in a variety of academic settings.
Selected Publications
"Exemplary England: Historical Inquiry and Literary Recompense in Pope, Gray, and Richardson." Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2023.
"Time Passed On: Prehistory and Female Power in Jane Austen's "Emma," Eighteenth-Century Theory and Interpretation, 65.3, 2025.
"Frightful Extravagancies: Eliza Haywood and Passionate Introspection," Philological Quarterly, 100.1, Winter 2021, 77-99.