About

I earned my master’s degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, writing my thesis on the relationship between seventeenth-century scientific writing and the prose style and narrative of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. I then earned a Ph.D. at the University of Iowa, continuing to study the relationship between literature and science. My dissertation, “Character Matters: Enlightenment Materialism and the Novel,” considers how controversial scientific ideas shaped literary characters in the long eighteenth century, from canonical works like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to lesser-known works like Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea and Mary Hays’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney. I am currently at work on a documentary digital edition of the works of Charles Gildon in partnership with 18thConnect.org that aims to make corrected, accurate editions of his fiction, poetry, and criticism more readily available.