UMass Boston

Area of Expertise

American Literature and Culture: Early Republic through the early twentieth century, urban literature, women writers, pedagogy

Degrees

PhD, English, University of Washington, 2000

MA, English, University of New Hampshire, 1995

BA, College of Letters, Wesleyan University, 1991

Professional Publications & Contributions

BOOKS

  • Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed in Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Review of English Studies.
  • At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850-1930. Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press, 2005. A Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

EDITED VOLUMES

  • “Early American Women Authors, Unbound,” with co-editors Leonard von Morzé and Renée Bergland. Women’s Studies 50.5 (2021).
  • Kelroy (1812), by Rebecca Rush. Edited, with introduction, notes, and contemporaneous documents. Broadview Press, 2016.
  • Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, with co-editor Melody Graulich. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999.

ARTICLES AND ESSAYS

  • “Early American Drama Beyond the Script: The Blockade of Boston and the Ancillary Archive.” American Literary History 34.2 (Summer, 2022).
  • “Circling the Squares: City-Building in Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.” In The Circulation of Culture in the Urban Atlantic World: From the Early Modern to Modernism. Ed. Leonard von Morzé. Palgrave-MacMillan, 2017. 129-154.
  • Kelroy’s Parlor Games.” Early American Literature 49:2 (2014): 467-497.
  • “Journalism and the Urban Novel.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 6: The American Novel, 1870-1940. Ed. Priscilla Wald and Michael A. Elliott. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 120-134.
  • “’Never . . . the half of another’: Figuring and Foreclosing Marriage in The Hermaphrodite,” in Philosophies of Sex: New Essays on The Hermaphrodite. Ed. Renée Bergland and Gary Williams. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. 93-107.
  • “Race, Politics, and Public Housekeeping: Contending Forces in Pauline Hopkins’s Boston.” Trotter Review 18.1 (2009): 6-22.
  • War, Memory and the Modern in The Age of Innocence: Wharton Remembers Bergson.” American Literature 80.3 (September 2008): 555-581.
  • “Naturist as Tourist: Mary Austin’s Automobile-Eye View in The Land of Journeys’ Ending.” Western American Literature 39.1 (Spring 2004): 54-78.
  • “’I Have Seen America Emerging’: Mary Austin’s Regionalism.” In The Blackwell Companion to American Regional Literature Ed. Charles Crow. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003. 532-550.
  • “The ‘Hotel Spirit’: Modernity and the Urban Home in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and Gilman’s Short Fiction.” Edith Wharton Review 18.2 (Fall 2002): 25-35
  • “A Taste for Center Stage: Consumption and Feminism in Austin’s A Woman of Genius.” In Exploring Lost Borders. Ed. Graulich and Klimasmith. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1999. 129-149.
  • “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction,” ATQ 19th Century American Literature and Culture 11.2 (June 1997): 115-135.
  • “Storytellers, Story Sellers: Artists, Muses and Exploitation in the Work of Mary Austin.” Southwestern American Literature 20.2 (1995): 21-33.

Additional Information
  • Associate Editor, The New England Quarterly

Teaching Interests

  • American Literature and Culture: Early Republic through the early twentieth century.
  • Urban literature, women writers, literature and architecture, pedagogy.

Major Fellowships

  • Andrew W. Mellon Short-Term Research Fellowship, Massachusetts Historical Society, 2022-23.
  • Stephen Botein Fellowship, American Antiquarian Society, 2008.
  • Faculty Fulbright Scholar, Czech Republic, 2006-7.
  • National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for College Teachers, 2002-3.