UMass Boston

American literature and culture; American protest movements and utopian thought; the 19th-century novel; the Civil War era; African American studies; queer studies.

PhD, Brandeis University

• "The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of Seven Gables." Critical Edition of The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ed. Robert Levine. Norton (2020): 399-412.
• American Radicals: How 19th-Century Protest Shaped the Nation (Crown/Penguin Random House 2019)
• “Boston’s Forgotten Fight against Slavery: It’s Time for a Historical Marker at the Site of a Pivotal Protest.” Boston Globe, 24 November 2019.
• “Beyond Suffrage: It’s Time to Fight for the Original and Unfulfilled Goals of the Women’s Movement.” Washington Post, 17 October 2019.
• “What Next? Expanding the Radical Promise of the American Revolution” October 10, 2019 Laphams Quarterly Online
• “Coming Out of the World: The 19th-Century Activist Tactic that Queers Should Reclaim (Again).” Public Seminar, 24 June 2019.
• Co-Organizer with Nadia Nurhussein, “Early Black Utopias” symposium, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Africana Studies, March 29, 2019
• “How to Protest the 4th of July." New York Times, July 3, 2018
• “Bring Back Election Day: America’s First Holiday Was About More Than Voting.” Washington Post, October 22, 2018
• “The Radicals’ Reconstruction: Jewett at Port Royal.” J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists 6.2. (November 2018).
• "The Marriage Trap in the Free-Love Novel and Queer Critique." American Literature 87.4 (December 2015): 681-708. (Winner of the Norman Foerster Prize)
• American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900. Oxford University Press, 2014.
• “Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Reversion in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter.” Early African American Print Culture. Eds. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein. University of Pennsylvania Press (2012): 192-202.
• “The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of the Seven Gables.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56:3 (September 2010).
• “‘So We Die before Our Own Eyes’: Willful Sterility in The Country of the Pointed Firs.” The New England Quarterly 82.2 (June 2009): 264-284.
• “Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley: Rethinking Race and Authorship.” PMLA 122 (May 2007): 728-741. (Winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2008 Article Prize)
• Book reviews in MELUS; Nineteenth-Century Contexts; Criticism; Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers; and Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture.

Conference presentations and invited talks:

Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, American Literature and Culture Seminar
Johns Hopkins University, “Humanities for All” event, a Mellon-funded partnership with the Community Colleges of Baltimore County 
Simmons College, Gay Memorial Lecture keynote speaker
Early African American Print Culture in Theory and Practice Symposium, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania.
Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and African American Identity Symposium, Duke University.
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Modernist Studies Association
American Literature Association
American Studies Association
African American Literature and Culture Society
Modern Language Association
Boston Book Festival
Tufts University English Department
Amherst College History Department

Courses Taught

• American Romanticism;
• Radical Boston: American Protest Literature to 1900;
• Cultures of the American Civil War;
• Reading Sexuality: Queer Theory;
• Sex, Family, and Nation in the American Novel;
• American Gothic Fiction.

Awards

• Massachusetts Book Awards, Non-fiction Honoree 2019
• Smithsonian Magazine, Ten Best History Books of the Year, 2019
• Norman Foerster Prize (for best essay published in American Literature), 2015
• Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize, 2008