DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

My intellectual attachments are to American narratives and novels, understood through theories of emotion (object relations psychoanalysis, histories of affect), as they emerge in specific literary modes: the melodrama; the gothic; and the sentimental forms.  I have traced these convergences across three very different projects.  My first book, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago: 1997) was a finalist for the MLA's First Book Prize. Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic (Chicago: 2010), my second book, is the first full-length literary study of Chesnut's revised Civil War narrative.  My third book, Bette Davis Black and White (Chicago: 2021), explores Davis’s collaboration with Black actors and community leaders during and after WWII, detailing her anti-racism and her occasional racist lapses.  Davis’s work in the genres of melodrama, gothic, and sentimental brings the genealogy of American women’s writing to the screen.

I offer courses in 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century American literature, with a focus on women's and African American writing (Rowlandson-Cather; Equiano-Larsen), the sentimental and the gothic, Faulkner, and the films of Bette Davis.   Throughout my career at Northwestern, I have been recognized for my teaching, with awards from The Faculty Honor Roll from the Associated Student Government (3 times), the Pan Hellenic Association's Teaching Recognition, Weinberg College's Distinguished Teaching Award, the Herman & Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professorship (2015-18); the Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence, and the award for Weinberg College's Outstanding Freshman Advisor. 

Specializations

African American Literature, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Film & Film Theory, American Literature to 1900, Critical Race Studies, Psychoanalytic Theory

Books

Bette Davis Black and White (University of Chicago Press, 2022)

Mary Chesnut's Civil War Epic (University Of Chicago Press, 2010)

The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (University Of Chicago Press, 1997)