CV

EMPLOYMENT

Humanities Administrator, National Endowment for the Humanities, May 2020 to present

Assistant Professor of English and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois General University Honors Program, Fisk University, January 2016 to May 2020

Visiting Assistant Professor, Rollins College, August 2012 to December, 2015

EDUCATION

Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2012
M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2009
B.A., Mathematics and English, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 2005

AWARDS and HONORS

Reciprocal Faculty Learning / Faculty Development in Quantitative and Computational Life Sciences Microgrant, 2019-20
UNCF/Mellon Domestic Faculty Seminar, Summer 2019
Faculty Research Grant, Children’s Literature Association, 2019
Fulbright Program Advisor Development Initiative, 2017
Faculty Instructional Technology Integration Grant, Rollins College, 2014–15
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar: Performing Dickens. Santa Cruz, California, 2014
Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminar for Liberal Arts College Faculty: Constructing Childhood in Words and Pictures. National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 2014
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), 2011–12
Mellon Summer Dissertation Seminar: Poetics and Modern Emotion, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2011
Outstanding T.A. Award, Department of English, University of Virginia, 2012
Brett Baxley Gosnell Prize for Mentoring First-Year Writing, University of Virginia, 2011

WORKS IN PROGRESS

A Companion to 19th-Century British Children’s Literature (under contract with McFarland & Co., forthcoming 2023)

Disney’s Victorians: Adaptation and Literary History in the Age of Corporate Media (under contract, awaiting permissions from an archive)

PUBLICATIONS

Book

The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744-1859 (University of Tennessee Press, 2016) documents the importance of children’s tales to the history of the novel. After tracing the origins of the moral tale from the mid-eighteenth century into the Romantic period, I show how Victorian writers like Charles Dickens incorporated the conventions of these tales into their own fictions. The Victorians grew up reading moral tales, and that childhood reading helps explain the imitative, didactic relationship that many Victorian novelists aim to create with their readers. The book has been reviewed in The Victorian WebStudies in the NovelNineteenth-Century Literature, and Modern Philology.

Chapters and Articles

“Social Networking with the Victorians.” In Teaching Victorian Literature in the 21st Century, editors Laurence Mazzeno and Jen Cadwallader (Palgrave, 2017)
After Dickens World: Performing Victorians at the Chatham Docks.” Neo-Victorian Studies 9.1 (2016)
Dickens, Disney, Oliver, & Company.Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 41.2 (Summer 2016)
“The Words Students Need and How They Can Learn Them: Teaching Literary Vocabulary in the Twenty-First Century.” Pedagogy 16.2 (Spring 2016)
“The Rise of the Moral Tale: The Governess, Children’s Literature, and the Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 46.4 (Summer 2013)
“‘The Delight of our Earlier Days’: Childhood, Narrative, and The Village School.” Journal of Narrative Theory 43.1 (Winter 2013)
“William Fulford, ‘The Set,’ and The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.” Victorian Periodicals Review 45.3 (Fall 2012)

Digital Projects

Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations. Launched in spring 2016, the curated website publishes short essays on Victorian adaptations. I am a founding editor of the site, and wrote the introductory essay about the theory behind it.
The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for 1856. A documentary edition, including transcriptions, page images, and an introduction to each issue and to each entry. Published in The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a Hypermedia Archive. Jerome J. McGann, general editor. August 2008.

Book Reviews

Literary Cultures and Eighteenth-Century Childhoods. Andrew O’Malley, ed. (2018). Eighteenth-Century Studies 53.3 (Spring 2020)
Ruth Y. Jenkins, Victorian Children’s Literature: Experiencing Abjection, Empathy, and the Power of Love (2016). The Lion and the Unicorn 41.3 (September 2017)
Thomas Leitch, Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age (2014). Pedagogy 16.3 (2016)
Marc Napolitano, Oliver!: A Dickensian Musical (2014). Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 42.2 (2015)
Catherine Robson, Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem (2012). Review 19, February 2013.
Juliet John, Dickens and Mass Culture (2010). Review 19, July 2011.
Review essay, Anna Jackson, Karen Coats, and Roderick McGillis, eds., The Gothic in Children’s Literature (2008) and Jarlath Killeen, The History of the Gothic (2009). Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:2 (2010)
Marilyn Pemberton, Enchanted Ideologies: A Collection of Rediscovered Nineteenth-Century Moral Fairy Tales (2009). Review 19, March 2010.

PUBLIC OUTREACH

After 200 years, Frankenstein still matters.” The Tennessean, October 26, 2018. 
V21 Summer Reading Group, hosted at Fisk University and including scholars from universities in Tennessee, Alabama, and Arizona. Nashville, summer, 2018.
“Inside Wikipedia.” Professor to Professor Series, Rollins College, March 2015
Guest Judge, Shakespeare Competition, The English-Speaking Union, Winter Park, FL, February 2015
“Dickens’s Christmas, from Childhood to the Stage.” Invited lecture, Orange County Public Library, December 2014
World’s fairs help us appreciate history and imagine the future.” Orlando Sentinel, August 28, 2014
“Dickens, Disney, Oliver, and Company.” Invited lecture, Orange County Public Library, August 2014 (watch an edited recording here)
Actor (Bradley Headstone), OMFG: A Dickensian Musical Farce, Dickens Universe, Santa Cruz, CA, August 2014
Literature more essential than ever as Shakespeare turns 450.” Orlando Sentinel, April 23, 2014
Harry Potter phenomenon is gone with the proverbial wind,” Orlando Sentinel, May 12, 2013