About Me

I like details—the smaller, the better—a predilection that led me from entire days spent building intricate Lego structures with my brother, Jesse, in Northern California to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While my intellectual interests broadened into Math, Literature, and French majors, I remained focused on the details of what I studied. In each case, I wanted to understand and explain units of knowledge, whether numbers or words, at their most fundamental level. When taking a course on Romanticism, I became fascinated by metaphors and their legacies in literary language. It was not evident to me then that metaphors would become the focus of my professional life, but good metaphors rarely yield their secrets at first glance. 

Drawn to graduate school in the humanities, I attended Rutgers University as a Transliteratures Fellow in the Comparative Literature program, where the skeptical agency of metaphor became the focus of my research. After a fellowship year at Universität Konstanz, I completed my dubiously spell-checked doctoral thesis “Useful Fictions,” which examined the multitiered wordplay of writers like Swift, Fielding, Sterne, and Byron. During my post-doctoral program at Fordham, I expanded my research on the relationship between skepticism and metaphor across the early modern European period while developing pedagogies to help students slow down the reading process and savor the details, work that I continue in my teaching, talks, and publications at IUP. 

I became an Assistant Professor at IUP in the Department of English in 2014 and have continued probing poems and novels with my undergraduate and graduate students, all the while reflecting on these initiatives in a series of articles in the field of Digital Humanities and, moreover, working on my first full book manuscript: “Leaving Lucretia: The Reimagined Heroines of Margaret Cavendish.” 

IUP students always surprise me; their candor, creativity, and enthusiasm in the classroom inspire me as a teacher, scholar, and member of our rich and varied community of learners.