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Education

PhD in English, with a specialization in Literary Theory and Cultural Studies

Biography

At the Threshold

I tend to think of the university as a threshold. Students arrive with one sense of what they might want to do, and somewhere along the way they begin figuring out what they are good at, what matters to them, and where those abilities might take them. I see my classroom as part of that crossing: a place to develop ideas and skills that students can carry into their professional and intellectual lives beyond �鶹��Ƶ����.

I came to �鶹��Ƶ���� in Fall 2025 after teaching at Michigan State University and Texas A&M University at Qatar. Having lived and worked across different countries and institutions, I have crossed a few thresholds myself, and those experiences shape how I teach and think about education. Outside the university, I love museums and travel, and I spend time working with breast cancer advocacy communities.

Teaching

At �鶹��Ƶ����, I teach global and Anglophone literature, technical and professional writing, and interdisciplinary �鶹��Ƶ���� Core courses.

One thing I talk about with students quite a bit is what happens to the skills they are developing once they leave my classroom. If you are an English major, you have probably heard the inevitable question: “So, what are you going to do with that?” I want my students to have a good answer.

Reading literature teaches you how to take something complicated apart and make sense of it. Research teaches you how to find information, decide what you can trust, and synthesize it quickly. Writing teaches you how to take all of that and communicate it to someone else.

I also don’t want excellent student work to reach a threshold and stop there. When possible, I encourage students to revise papers for departmental prizes, develop promising class projects into research, present their work, or turn professional-writing assignments into portfolio pieces they can actually show an employer. The classroom should be a starting point, not the final destination of their work.

Scholarship

My research has taken me across thresholds too: between disciplines, countries, archives, and forms of scholarship. I work in postcolonial and Global South studies, particularly around girlhood, speculative fiction, cultural memory, and the medical humanities. These subjects can look quite different on the surface, but I keep returning to a similar question: how do people make lives for themselves within systems they did not choose, and how do literature and culture help us imagine something different?

Some of that research is deeply personal. I am a breast cancer survivor, and I co-edit a forthcoming Rutgers University Press book about breast cancer survivorship in academic life. That experience changed the kinds of questions I ask about medicine, institutions, storytelling, and whose experiences get heard.

I have also been fortunate to receive funding that has allowed me to cross literal as well as intellectual thresholds. My work has been supported by a Fulbright award, the Mellon Foundation, the German Foreign Ministry, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Library Research Fellowship, and a South Asia Digital Archives Grant from the University of Central Florida. These opportunities have allowed me to work in archives, travel for research, collaborate across institutions, and follow questions into places I could not have reached from my desk alone.

That is one reason I want students to know about this side of academic life. Research is not simply sitting alone and writing. It can mean entering an archive for the first time, applying for a fellowship, presenting an idea to strangers at a conference, recording a podcast, working with someone on the other side of the world, or discovering that one question has opened the threshold to another.

Why This Matters to Me

I hope students leave my courses knowing how to enter an unfamiliar conversation, figure out what is going on, ask intelligent questions, find and evaluate information, understand perspectives different from their own, and communicate something useful in response. I also want them to know that opportunities such as grants, fellowships, archives, conferences, and research experiences are not reserved for professors. Students can cross those thresholds too, and part of my job is helping them recognize when a door is there and giving them the confidence to walk through it.

For me, that is what the university can be at its best: a threshold between what students already know themselves to be capable of and what they have not yet imagined they might become.

Student Involvement Opportunities

Professional documents through ENG 305, including résumés, cover letters, proposals, reports, and writing portfolios that students can carry into the job market. Fulbright and fellowship applications, helping students understand how to frame a project and make a persuasive case for its significance. Grant writing, from identifying opportunities to translating an idea into a clear and competitive proposal. Conference presentations, including opportunities such as the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference, where student research can enter a larger scholarly conversation. Undergraduate research, helping promising classroom projects develop into sustained research, collaborative papers, or presentations. Departmental prizes and awards, encouraging students to revise strong course papers rather than allowing good work to end with a grade.