Humanities Administrator, Division of Education Programs, National Endowment for the Humanities, May 2020 to present
NOFO Officer, Office of Grant Management, National Endowment for the Humanities. Temporary assignment, April 2023 to January 2024.
Assistant Professor of English and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois General University Honors Program, Fisk University, January 2016 to May 2020
Visiting Assistant Professor, Rollins College, August 2012 to December, 2015
EDUCATION
Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2012 M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, 2009 B.A., Mathematics and English, Pomona College, Claremont, CA, 2005
AWARDS and HONORS
Independent Study, Research, and Development Award (internal NEH award), 2022-2024
Reciprocal Faculty Learning / Faculty Development in Quantitative and Computational Life Sciences Microgrant, 2019-20
UNCF/Mellon Domestic Faculty Seminar, Summer 2019
Faculty Research Grant, Children’s Literature Association, 2019
Fulbright Program Advisor Development Initiative, 2017
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar: Performing Dickens. Santa Cruz, California, 2014
Jessie Ball duPont Summer Seminar for Liberal Arts College Faculty: Constructing Childhood in Words and Pictures. National Humanities Center, North Carolina, 2014
Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES), 2011–12
Mellon Summer Dissertation Seminar: Poetics and Modern Emotion, Charlottesville, Virginia, 2011
Outstanding T.A. Award, Department of English, University of Virginia, 2012
Brett Baxley Gosnell Prize for Mentoring First-Year Writing, University of Virginia, 2011
The Legacy of the Moral Tale: Children’s Literature and the English Novel, 1744-1859 (University of Tennessee Press, 2016) documents the importance of children’s tales to the history of the novel. After tracing the origins of the moral tale from the mid-eighteenth century into the Romantic period, I show how Victorian writers like Charles Dickens incorporated the conventions of these tales into their own fictions. The Victorians grew up reading moral tales, and that childhood reading helps explain the imitative, didactic relationship that many Victorian novelists aim to create with their readers. The book has been reviewed in The Victorian Web, Studies in the Novel, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and Modern Philology.
Streaky Bacon: A Guide to Victorian Adaptations. Launched in spring 2016, the curated website published short essays on Victorian adaptations. I helped found the site and wrote the introductory essay about the theory behind it. The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine for 1856. A documentary edition, including transcriptions, page images, and an introduction to each issue and to each entry. Published in The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a Hypermedia Archive. Jerome J. McGann, general editor. August 2008.
