Currently, I am at Penn State Brandywine, serving as Interim Director of Academic Affairs through June 30, 2024.  At Brandywine, I oversee academic operations, including curriculum and course offerings, advising, student disability resources, and faculty affairs. I am excited every time I hear about a student accomplishment or a faculty accomplishment, and I work with our faculty, staff, and students to confront the difficult issues in higher education today.

I’m a professor of English at Penn State York, where I’ve been teaching since 2003.  We’re a small campus, so I get to know lots of students by teaching a variety of writing and literature classes, including first-year composition and rhetoric, introductory literature classes in the short story and women’s fiction, and upper-level courses in literary theory, Caribbean literature, twentieth-century British literature, and women’s literature.  I am the proud winner of the 2020  University College Faculty Council Award for Teaching, and I am editor of the online annual journal The Space Between:  Literature and Culture, 1914-1945.

My second book, Rum Histories:  Drinking in Atlantic Literature and Culture, has been published by the University of Virginia Press, and an essay on teaching Sylvia Townsend Warner appears in Teaching Modernist Women’s Writing in English (2021), edited by Janine Utell.  My colleague at Macalester College, Sonita Sarker, and I are working on two related projects theorizing the relationship between whiteness and modernist studies. I am also in the middle of smaller projects about Susan Glaspell and Zitkala Ša, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland, and Venu Chitale.  In addition, I’ve published on the TV series Downton Abbey, and the film Avatar.  In 2005, I published a book called Narrative Settlements:  Geographies of British Women’s Fiction between the Wars, in which I studied how women writers in Great Britain used iconic locations to investigate the changing role of women in England and the ways that change might reshape England’s territorial sovereignty.

When I’m not in the office, you can find me running, on the tennis courts, experimenting with vegan cooking, sewing . . . or reading, of course.