B.A. in English, University of California, Riverside, 2008
M.A. in English, University of California, Riverside, 2012
Committee:
Susan Zieger (Chair), Adriana Craciun, Seth Lerer (UCSD)
Research Areas:
Victorian Literature and Culture, Nineteenth-Century Media Entertainments and Technologies, Print Culture, Visual Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature
Research Interests:
My dissertation, On Fire: Industrialization, Media Technologies, and the Imagination, 1800-1900, considers the intersecting discourses of entertainment media and industrialization, and argues that fire, in its multiple forms, is a media technology that must be recovered and situated within an archive of animated, moving images. Firelight occupied an increasingly central place in nineteenth-century conversations about art, architecture, popular science, and literature as new lighting and heating technologies superseded traditional wood and coal fires. This dissertation is not merely a description of technological changes that occurred to devices, but a history of Victorian imaginations and an exploration of affective relationships that form around media entertainments.
Recent Activity:
Conferences –
“Victorians in Pompeii: Vesuvian Pyrodramas and the Grand Tour.” North American Victorian Studies Association, Honolulu, HI, 2015.
“Painted Words and Pyrotechnic Displays: Synesthesia in M.P. Shiel’s Shapes in the Fire.” Midwestern Victorian Studies Association Conference, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, 2015.
“‘The Spark of Life’: Fireside Media and (Re)Animation in Our Mutual Friend.” Dickens Universe Winter Conference, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN, 2015.
“Fireside Dickens: Redefining the Hearth as a Proto-Cinematic Spectacle.” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies. University of Houston, Houston, TX, 2014.
“Printing Narnia: Textual Topographies, Paratextual Maps, and Ordering the Reader’s Narrative Journey.” Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 2013.
“Awakening from the Phantasmagoria: Redefining Children’s Books as Media.” Critical Speculations: Future Worlds, Perilous Histories, and Walter Benjamin Unbound, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, University at Albany-SUNY, Albany, NY, 2012.
Service –
Peer Mentor, Graduate Student Mentorship Program, 2014-2015
TA Assistant Director for English 1ABC, 2013-2014
Editor, The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction, 2012-2013
President, UCR Graduate Students in English Association, 2012-2013
Secretary, UCR Graduate Students in English Association, 2011-2012
Publicity Committee Chair, UCR (dis)junctions Conference, 2012
Awards –
Outstanding Teaching Award, University Writing Program, 2014
Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award, English, 2013
Second Place, Graduate Student Essay Contest, 2013
Third Place, Graduate Student Essay Contest, 2012