Welcome to my home page!
Currently, I am an assistant professor of American literature at Central Washington University. I previously served as a visiting assistant professor at Gettysburg College (2014-2018) and received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland and a B.A. from Colgate University. My book-in-progress, Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans’ Foreign Relations, argues that writers across the century depicted Americans as the friends and family of diverse foreign peoples and thereby explored how feeling influences America’s international relations and national identity. The courses I teach in early American literature, critical methods/theory, and comics take up similar questions: How do various literary genres help to construct national, racial, and gender identities? How do writers invite readers to feel for particular peoples? Who is excluded from these models of empathy?
Outside the office you can find me listening to the Pop Culture Happy Hour Podcast, cooking my way through the Smitten Kitchen archives, watching “The Good Place,” or practicing yoga.
Here are descriptions of a few of recent and upcoming courses that I've designed.
"Landscape Scene from 'The Last of the Mohicans'" by Thomas Cole (Fenimore Art Museum)
In the early nineteenth-century, American writers adapted the historical romance to relate dramatic stories about the country’s past and imagine how this past would shape the future. These narratives present national origins stories, including tales of Puritans’ witch-hunts, Native-Anglo conflicts, Revolutionary War battles, and slave revolts. Reading these texts elicits questions as to why authors were fascinated with both events from centuries prior and the more recent past. What stories did official histories leave out and literary texts strive to recover? Who plays a central role in these narratives of the past and who continues to influence the national future? When did writers celebrate America, creating mythic American heroes and heroines? When did they offer critical or satirical portraits of the nation?
"Uncle Tom and Little Eva" by Robert S. Duncanson (Detroit Institute of Arts)
This course takes up the argument that nineteenth-century literature was a crucial site for developing both a newly emergent national identity and shifting understandings of racial identity. In particular, we will explore how these questions of national and racial identity intersect in work by diverse writers who returned again and again to depictions of the family in order to explore who belonged to the U.S. nation. We will consider literature’s role in debates over slavery, immigration, and territorial expansion, which influenced national “development” and shifting race relations. Notably, nineteenth-century writers’ questions about who belongs to the “national family” remain central to our contemporary discourse on race; we see this, for instance, in recent media representations of Michael Brown as either beloved son or young criminal and the related claims over whether his death should be mourned by the country.
From Ida B. Wells by Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant)
For decades, comics were read outside the classroom as an escape from “serious” reading, either too suggestive or trivial to merit study. This course examines how now—even as comics remain controversial for their graphic depictions of violence and sexuality—museums, libraries, and college classes recognize their rich visuals and narratives. Texts like Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and Here offer a fresh look at familiar literary topics, ranging from war to adolescence. Through representations of both personal and political histories, we will explore when comics are funny and serious. How have they developed over time? Why have they become the hot thing to read? And what happens when we view them as "high brow" art?
Over the past two decades, scholars such as Jane Tompkins, Shirley Samuels, and Benedict Anderson have established sympathy’s key role in nineteenth-century literary culture and the development of U.S. nationalism. While examining the bonds that feeling forges among citizens, however, critics have neglected the question of how sympathy also links Americans to the larger world. In Global Sympathy: Representing Nineteenth-Century Americans’ Foreign Relations, I argue that depictions of global sympathy—wherein characters identify with members of different cultures and share imaginatively in their pleasure and pain—pervade nineteenth-century U.S. literature.
My project draws on Enlightenment theories of feeling and recent work in cosmopolitanism and global American studies to analyze critically overlooked representations of foreign feeling by Royall Tyler, James Fenimore Cooper, Maria Cummins, Nathaniel Hawthorne, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Pauline Hopkins. In so doing, I rethink Amy Kaplan’s influential argument that sentimental literature and the sympathy it evokes are complicit in U.S. imperialism. I argue that literary expressions of Americans’ foreign sympathy speak to a more complex range of interests, from advocating missionary work to contesting racism, and at times even offer powerful challenges to U.S. imperialism. Through these nuanced depictions of U.S.-foreign relations, authors narrativized the nation’s political, territorial, and cultural changes, while underscoring the persistent importance of feeling in defining America’s global role.
