Current Position: Macalester College. Professor, English Department (2015-present). Special Assistant to the Provost for Strategic Initiatives (2023-2025). Department Chair (2017-2021). Director of Digital Liberal Arts (2019-2021).

Boards: Executive Board, Associated Departments of English (2024-2027); President, Midwest Victorian Studies Association (2022-2024); Modern Language Association Committee on Academic Freedom, Professional Rights and Responsibilities (Chair 2017-2018, Committee 2015-2017); Midwest Modern Language Association (President, 2013-2014; Treasurer, 2014-2015; Executive Committee, 2011- 2013).

Prior Positions: Eastern Michigan University. Professor of Victorian literature and culture (2000-2015) and Literature Programs Coordinator (2005-2012).

Books

Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature, and the Victorian Middle Classes, University of Toronto Press, 2010. Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the year. Reviewed in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Review19, Studies in English Literature, Victorian Periodicals Review, Victorian Studies.

Children and Empire Series (4 vols.), co-edited with Cheryl Cassidy. Routledge Press, 2012. Vol 1: The “Civilizing” Mission: Education, Morality and Conversion; Vol 2: Management of Children: Life in Sickness and in Health; Vol 3: Migrations and Cultural Differences: Children throughout the Empire; Vol 4: Empire’s Children at Home: The Domestic Impact of a Presence Abroad.

Articles

“Photography as Knowledge Infrastructure,” Victorian Literature and Culture, forthcoming.

“Gestures of Connection: Victorian Technologies of Photography and ‘Invisible’ Mothering,” Victorian Studies 65.2 (Winter 2023), 193-225.

“Picturing the Villain: Image-Making and the Indian Uprising,” Victorian Studies 63.2 (Winter 2021): 193-223.

“Identifying as a Reader: On Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë,” My Victorian Novel. Ed. Annette Federico. University of Missouri Press, 2020: 35-54.

“Travel Writing,” Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture. Eds. Talia Schaefer and Dennis Denisoff. Routledge Press, 2019: 473-84.

“Addressing Campus Violence Online and in Your Classrooms,” Profession, Spring 2019.

“Fashioning the Spectacle of Japan: Isabella Bird and the Periodical Press,” The Edinburgh History of Victorian Women’s Print Media, 1830-1900, Eds. Alexis Easley, Clare Gill, and Beth Rodgers. Edinburgh UP, 2019: 256-76.

“Introduction: Cities and the Narratives that Build Them,” Journal of the Midwest MLA 48.2 (Fall 2015): 7-14.

“A Conference Manifesto for the Rest of Us,” Inside Higher Ed, May 15, 2015. Co-authored with Cora Fox and Rebecca Walsh.

“Maternity Betrayed: Circulating Images of English Motherhood in India, 1857-1858,”Nineteenth-Century Contexts 35.2 (May 2013): 187-21

“Redesigning Femininity: Miss Marjoribanks’s Drawing-Room of Opportunity,” Victorian Literature and Culture, 36.1 (2008): 163-86.

“’Becoming a Victorian Reader’: The Serial Reading Process in the Modern Classroom,” Periodical Pedagogy, a special issue of VPR: Victorian Periodicals Review. 38.4 (Winter 2006): 330-342.

“Constance Naden and the Erotics of Evolution: Mating the Woman of Letters with Man of Science,” Nineteenth-Century Literature, 61.2 (September 2006): 200-40. [Reprinted in “Darwinism,” Ed. Kathy D. Darrow. Nineteenth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol 224 Detroit: Cenage Learning, 2010: 117-215.]

Invited Talks

“Faces in the Margins,” Nineteenth-Century Media Studies Workshop, Dartmouth College, NH, May 2023.

“Collaborative Structures for the Study of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at a Critical Moment,” ADE/ADFL Summer Seminar East, plenary panel, State College, PA, June 2022.

“Teaching in the Pandemic: Online Apps for Building Communities of Readers and Writers,” ADE/ADFL Zoom Seminar for Chairs (online), December 2020.

“Embedded in Empire: Lucie Duff Gordon’s Egypt,” Keynote, Victorian Interdisciplinary Association of the Western US, Seattle, WA, November 2019.

“Do the Humanities Matter?” Macalester Big Ideas. Portland, OR. September 26, 2019.

 “’A mirage of false wants’: Lucie Duff Gordon and Victorian Images of Egypt,” Humanities Faculty Colloquium, Macalester College, March 5, 2019.

“Here and There: Nostalgia, Dispossession, and the Colonial Prerogative or Rootedness,” Plenary, University of Saint Thomas Graduate Student Conference, April 2018.

“The Literary World of Delacroix,” Minneapolis Institute of Arts. November 7, 2015.

“The ‘Butcher of Cawnpore’; or, the Enigmatic Villain in the Archives” Jan Serie Center for Scholarship and Teaching, Macalester College. September 21, 2015.

“Who Cooked All That Soup? Gender Politics and 19th Century Jewish Philanthropy,” Ann

Arbor Jewish Community Center. April 11, 2012.

“Turning Fans into Friends: Dickens, Twain and the Culture of Public Reading,” Eastern Michigan University.  March 30, 2010.

“Victorian Literature and Architecture,” Rotary Club of Plymouth, MI.  January 19, 2007.