Research Areas:

19th-Century Scottish Literature and Culture
19th-Century Periodicals
Medical Humanities
Victorian Women’s Writing
Digital Humanities

As a Professor of Instruction, I enjoy teaching undergraduates in a range of courses, including those that delve into nineteenth-century Scottish literature and culture, Victorian women’s writing, the medical humanities, and fin-de-siècle fiction. I have completed Teaching & Learning in the Diverse Classroom (Cornell University) and Beyond the Numbers—Foundations for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (U of Iowa).

My research is archive-based and interdisciplinary, drawing from fields in the arts, humanities, and sciences. My book Pointed Encounters: Scottish Dance in Post-Culloden Literature (Brill-Rodopi, 2014) traces the complicated role of social dancing in Scottish culture and identifies the motif of dance—in songs, poetry, dance manuals, and fiction—as a covertly subversive expression of Scottish identity during the period 1750-1830. In my digital humanities project Under the Banner of Waverley (launched 2017), I interweave stories, interactive maps, and an array of evocative images to investigate Walter Scott’s literary legacy in the United States. More recent publications explore the intersection of Scottish women’s work and literary production to underscore the rich plurality of female experience and alternative narratives.