Expertise

My work engages with a wide archive of mostly discredited cultural texts, including non-canonical 19th-century transatlantic women's literature and contemporary media, specifically literature, film, and television. As it relates to these texts I have particular interest in how identity is discursively gendered, constructed, and embodied through written and mediated means, as well as how gender, sex, sexuality, race, and class work together to inform notions of the "normative" self. Celebrity, masculinity, and American religious cultures have become important themes, offering a framework for coherency across the many modalities in which I work.


Research Interests

  • popular culture, film, television, and reality television; feminist theory and the body; celebrity and gender; the politics of representation; masculinity; nineteenth-century transatlantic literature; theories of identity; cultural citizenship; american religious culture
Past Affiliations
Communities
North American Studies, Gender Studies
Degrees
PhD, Miami University, Victorian Literature, 2001
MA, University of Kentucky, English Literature, 1995
MLitt, Aberdeen University, Scotland, Cultural History, 1994
BA, University of Arizona, English, 1987