Research

I study literary history as a way to engage students, scholars, activists, and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. As a survivor who finds it healing and empowering to understand how our culture became a rape culture, I’m passionate about sharing the knowledge I’ve fought to access and produce.

I’m working on two books: Schools of Love, a hybrid #MeToo memoir / literary history of rape culture, and Victorian Gaslighting, an edited collection of essays on cases of gaslighting in nineteenth-century Britain. Schools of Love tells an intimate story of recovery alongside a centuries-old history of influence, stretching from ancient Roman poetry to modern American film. I narrate the saga of how Ovid’s rape manual, The Art of Love, and his Pygmalion myth established a blueprint for rape culture that would fuel, normalize, and perpetuate its violent myths for two millennia. I take readers on a fast-paced journey through world-changing cultural events across epochs—from the Golden Age of Augustan Rome to France’s twelfth-century Renaissance to Europe’s eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions to our Digital Information Age. The first publication from this project, “Rape Culture, A Literary History from Ovid to Shakespeare,” will appear in New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions (under contract with SUNY Press), co-edited by Michael Dango, Erin Spampinato, and Doreen Thierauf.

I am also co-editor, with Nora Gilbert (University of North Texas) and Tara MacDonald (University of Idaho), of a collection-in-progress called Victorian Gaslighting (under contract with SUNY Press), which traces a cultural history of gaslighting across the long nineteenth century. My chapter for this book tells the story of how Vernon Lee, prolific late-Victorian art critic and lesbian intellectual, was gaslit by critics of her novel, Miss Brown (1884), in which she called out rape culture in London’s high-art circles.

My publications on Victorian magic-portrait fiction, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and leaving academia have appeared in The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, and Public Books.

I am the grateful recipient of research grants and prizes that crucially fostered my intellectual development during early years of training. The awards most essential to my scholarly labor include,

William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Fellowship, University of California Los Angeles, 2013

Edgar Hill Duncan Award for Distinguished Overall Graduate Career, English Department, Vanderbilt University, 2012

Elizabeth E. Fleming Dissertation Fellowship, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, 2011-2012

Susan F. Wiltshire Essay Prize for Best Graduate Essay in Women’s & Gender Studies, Vanderbilt University, 2009

John M. Aden Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Writing, Vanderbilt University, 2008

B. William Hochman ’55 Memorial Prize for Excellence in American Literature Courses, Dartmouth College, 2004

Image: Pygmalion and Galatea by Jean-Léon Gérôme (ca. 1890). Via The Met.