Bio

Raised in a northern Virginia suburb of DC, I received my BA in English from Dartmouth College and my MA and PhD in English from Vanderbilt University. At Vanderbilt, I specialized in nineteenth-century British literature and histories of gender and sexuality. In 2013, I chose to forego a teaching career to pursue nonprofit work and archival research.

My partner, Matt Duquès, and I have lived in many places—Nashville, TN, Fargo, ND, Florence, AL, and Philadelphia, PA—during our journey through and beyond academia. In Alabama, I gave birth to and cared for our two babies while learning the nonprofit world and launching the literary historical investigation that evolved into Schools of Love. Matt taught Early American literature at the University of North Alabama, where he received tenure in 2019. We established The Fringe Foundation during our years as new parents with new jobs in new places.

In 2019, Matt sacrificed his tenured position so we could move to Philadelphia to raise our kids closer to our families and to revive the Penn Book Center, an independent bookstore that had served the University of Pennsylvania community since 1962. We devoted a year of our lives to bringing PBC back to life before Covid-19 upended our plans. The bookstore closed in the summer of 2020.

My book-in-progress, Schools of Love, interweaves my #MeToo story with the untold history of Ovid’s Art of Love, an ancient Roman joke book that teaches men to rape, and how this rape-manual-turned-schoolboy-textbook influenced western culture for two thousand years, popularizing rape myths that remain current today. The first piece from this project, “Rape Culture, A Literary History from Ovid to Shakespeare,” will appear in the New Rape Studies (SUNY 2026), edited by Michael Dango, Erin Spampinato, and Doreen Thierauf. My first book, Victorian Gaslighting, a collection of essays that traces the cultural origins of gaslighting, co-edited with Nora Gilbert (University of North Texas) and Tara MacDonald (University of Lethbridge), comes out in March 2026.

The pleasures that sustain me when I’m not parenting, researching, or writing are baking desserts, doing yoga, designing interior spaces, and being by the ocean. I also love me some poetry by Donika Kelly, personal essays by Deanna Kreisel, and everything by Lyz Lenz.

Photo by Jonene Nelson, Owner of No Name Gallery