Scholarship:

My teaching and scholarship explore literature and culture of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Great Britain, with a particular focus on Scotland. Archival research in England and Scotland led to my book entitled Pointed Encounters: Dance in Post-Culloden Scottish Literature (2014, in the SCROLL series from Brill-Rodopi Press:  http://www.brill.com/products/book/pointed-encounters).  Tracing the central motif of Highland dance as an outwardly conforming but covertly subversive expression of Scottish identity, I investigate Scottish musical traditions and literary forms developed between 1750 and 1830.  More recently, I have been exploring Sir Walter Scott’s remarkable legacy in the United States, particularly towns named Waverly and Waverley Magazine.

Courses taught: 

The British Novel: Scott to Butler; Introduction to the Novel; Honors First-Year Seminar (Victorian Medical Mysteries and Their Modern Counterparts); Literature and Culture of Nineteenth-Century Britain; Literature and Culture of Nineteenth-Century England; Literature and Culture of Nineteenth-Century Scotland; Reading Novels; Reading Short Stories; Selected Authors: Walter Scott and George Eliot; Selected British Authors Before 1900: Jane Austen and Walter Scott; Selected British Authors: Charles Dickens and Margaret Oliphant; Selected British Authors: George Eliot and Oscar Wilde; Selected Works of the Eighteenth Century; Topics in British Culture and Identity (Diabolical Doctors, Patience Proponents, and Infectious Intrigue in Victorian Fiction); Topics in British Literature (A Question of Identity: Fiction of the Fin de Siècle; Telling Tales: Short Stories from Great Britain & Ireland); Victorian Literature (Remarkable Women: Victorian Narratives of Quest and Transformation); and Women in Literature