EMPLOYMENT
UCLA Department of English: Lecturer (2019-2020; 2024-present)
Oklahoma State University Department of English: Assistant Professor (2020 - 2024)
Education
Ph.D., English: University of California, Los Angeles (2019)
M.A., English: University of California, Los Angeles (2014)
B.A., English, magna cum laude: Princeton University (2007)
Research interests
Critical food studies, health and environmental humanities, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglophone literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, print and fan cultures
Publications
“Byron’s Poetics of Indigestion,” ELH: English Literary History 90:1 (Spring 2023): 55-76.
“The Wild Irish Girl Diet,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 60:3 (Summer 2020): 551-575.
“‘All the Bright Eyes of the Kingdom’: Charlotte Lennox’s Discursive Communities,” Eighteenth-Century Life 41:2 (April 2017): 89-104.
Book Reviews
Review of Jessica Martell, Farm to Form: Modernist Literature and Ecologies of Food in the British Empire, in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Fall 2022)
Review of Scott Black, Without the Novel: Romance and the History of Prose Fiction in Modern Philology 118:3 (2020)
Book chapters
“Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels” in Unsettling Sexuality: Eighteenth-Century Queer Horizons, eds. Jeremy Chow and Shelby Johnson (University of Delaware Press), forthcoming
Selected Public Writing
“Writing Romance Novels as a Sacred Practice: An interview with Vanessa Zoltan,” Los Angeles Review of Books blog (August 2019)
“The Consolation of Genre: On Reading Romance Novels,” Los Angeles Review of Books (August 2018)
“The Global Potato: Food Futures of the Past,” kcet.org (August 2018)
“The Re-Read: Jane Eyre,” Early Bird Books (April 2016)
“Tainted Love: 4 Macabre Literary Love Stories,” The Lineup (February 2016)
”Valentine’s Day Antidote: Villette by Charlotte Bronte,” Early Bird Books (February 2016)
Writer, NASSR (North American Society for the Study of Romanticism) Graduate Student Caucus: Contributed a monthly, research-related post to the website (2015-2016)
”Shu-Mei Shih’s Senior Faculty Feminist Lecture on ‘Is Feminism Translatable? Taiwan, Spivak, A-Wu,’” CSW Update (April 2013): 15-17
Courses designed and taught
Austenland: Jane Austen’s Life and Afterlives
Conversations in Literature: Critical Food Studies
Critical Reading and Writing: Authors, Fans, Adaptation, and Appropriation
Critical Reading and Writing: Food and Filth
English Composition, Rhetoric and Language
Exploring Literature: Guilty Pleasures, Bad Appetites
Food Cultures & Food Politics
Food and Literature in the Long Eighteenth Century: Taste, Appetite, and the Body
Food Studies and Food Justice in Los Angeles
The Literature of Indigestion (Graduate course)
Natural Narratives: Environmental Literature & Culture
Survey of British Literature II: 1800-present
Quixotic Consumers: Reading the Historical Romance
Awards and Fellowships
Center for the Humanities Research Group Fellow, Oklahoma State University (2022-2023)
ASECS Fellow, William Andrews Clark Library (February 2020)
Mayers Fellow, Huntington Library (July-August 2019)
Dissertation Year Fellowship, Graduate Division, UCLA (2017-2018)
Chawton House Library Visiting Fellow (March 2017)
Dissertation Research Fellowship, English Department, UCLA (2016-2017)
Global Food Initiative Fellow, UC Office of the President (2015-2016)
Dean’s Mellon Fellowship, UCLA (2015-2016)
Graduate Research Mentorship, UCLA (2014-2015)
Graduate Summer Research Mentorship, UCLA (Summer 2014)
Dean’s Mellon Fellowship, UCLA (2011-2012)
LECTURES and Presentations
Invited Lectures & Presentations
“The Social Life of Bowels.” University of Texas, Austin, February 2022
“Gut Reading from Pope to Keats.” Oklahoma State University, January 2020
Conference Presentations
“Eighteenth-century food sovereignties: on leisure gardens and provision grounds.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (March 2023)
“Redefining the Archive in Queer Historical Romance Novels.” British Association of Romantic Studies / North American Society for the Study of Romanticism conference (August 2022)
“Melancholy Collaborations and Companionship in the Writings of Dorothy Wordsworth.” Indiana University-Bloomington Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies Workshop (May 2022)
“‘Here He Grew Inarticulate with Retching’: On Unruly Bodies and the Limits of Expression.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (April 2022)
Presenter, “The Alimentary Canal: Teaching Medical Humanities.” Roundtable participant, “Queer Horizons.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (April 2021)
“The Wild Irish Girl Diet.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (March 2020); cancelled
Presenter, “Table talk in Don Juan,” Roundtable participant, “Eighteenth-Century Fan Fiction: Then and Now.” Annual Meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (March 2019)
“Undigested Sentiment in John Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (January 2018)
“Undigested Sentiment in John Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (August 2017)
“Melancholy Guts and Treasured Trash in Dorothy Wordsworth's Grasmere Journal.” Annual Meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (August 2016)
Graduate Student Representative, “Dickens Universe,” University of California, Santa Cruz (August 2015)
“‘Disclaim[ing] all Title to a Legal Father:’ Common Law, Community, and Paratexts in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote.” David Nichol Smith Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies (December 2014)
Research and editorial Experience
Researcher for Mellon-EPIC Seminar in Teaching Excellence: Medical Humanities (Fall 2018-Winter 2019)
Historical and Literary Consultant for writer-producer Leila Gerstein, who was developing a TV show based on Jane Austen’s novels (Fall 2018-Winter 2019)
Researcher and Coordinator for “Making the Best of It: Nimble Foods for Climate Chaos,” a site-specific culinary installation project developed by artist Marina Zurkow in collaboration with UCLA’s Laboratory for Environmental Narrative Strategies (LENS) and experimental chef duo Hank & Bean (2018-2019)
Managing Editor for yearlong collaboration between LENS and KCET, an independent public television network (2017-2018)
Clark Library Transcription Project: Using Dromio software, transcribed seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts from the Clark Library’s collection (Summer 2017 & 2018)
Researcher for Professor Allison Carruth (2015-2017)
• Conducted bibliographic research for Literature and Food Studies (Routledge, 2018)
• Funded by the UC Global Food Initiative Fellowship, worked with Professor Allison Carruth to develop Food Politics & the Arts: Historical Perspectives, a new course for UCLA’s Food Studies minor
Service
Member, OSU English Department Committee on Anti-Racism and Equity: Designing and organizing events on topics including: the limits and possibilities of Indigenous land acknowledgments; confronting racial bias in graduate teaching and research; designing inclusive syllabi (2021-2023)
Co-Chair, UCLA Marathon Reading: Coordinated 24-hour relay-style reading of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea with dozens of readers and hundreds of guests; organized affiliated crowd-funding campaign that raised over $10,500 for English student research grants (2017-2018)
Academic Mentor, UCLA Department of English (2016-2017)
Graduate Coordinator, UCLA Nineteenth Century Group (2015-2016)
Co-Coordinator, UCLA Eighteenth Century/Romantics Working Group (2013-2014)
Work Experience
Knewton, Inc. (New York, NY): Teacher and Academic Support (2010-2011)
Sarah Crichton Books, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY): Editorial Assistant (2007-2009)
Princeton Summer Journalism Program (Princeton, NJ): Program Coordinator (2005)
References
Professor Saree Makdisi, UCLA Department of English, makdisi@humnet.ucla.edu
Professor Anahid Nersessian, UCLA Department of English, nersessian@humnet.ucla.edu
Professor Allison Carruth, Princeton Program in American Studies and High Meadows Environmental Institute, acarruth@princeton.edu
Professor Helen Deutsch, UCLA Department of English, hdeutsch@humnet.ucla.edu
Professor Jonathan Grossman, UCLA Department of English, grossman@humnet.ucla.edu
Professor Christopher Mott, UCLA Department of English, mott@humnet.ucla.edu