Scholar

My dissertation, A Pharmacy of Her Own: Victorian Women and the Figure of the Opiate, locates underexamined representations of female characters using opiates in Victorian literature in order to explore a surprising trend: while male drug users are typically depicted as destructive both to self and society, the figure of the opiate for female characters often serves as a catalyst for exploring agency and straying, if only temporarily, from a conventional narrative trajectory toward marriage and motherhood. Because the opiate in these texts accompanies the figure of the writing woman, my dissertation is as much about the nature of writing as it is about drug depictions. The figure of the opiate in these texts represents the disruptive seduction of writing and reading for female characters.

More recently, I have been conducting research and writing articles about mentoring and educating peer tutors.

My research and reading interests include:

• Feminist theory and gender studies
• Victorian, fin de siecle, and Edwardian literature
• Literature by women
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
• Representations of drugs
• Gothic, horror, fairy tales, fabulism, and magical realism
• Film adaptations of 19th C texts
• Bibliomania and the materiality of the book
• Educating educators; the mentorship and education of tutors
• Linguistic racism

Please see the Writer page for links to my publications.