Department of English

 

I am a Ph.D. candidate, and I specialize in children’s literature and critical disability studies. I hold an M.A. from the University of Florida in English and a B.A. in English and French literature from Bryn Mawr College.

My dissertation, Disability and the Maturation Plot: Coming of Age for the Disabled Child Protagonist, explores how children’s authors emplot maturation around disability, often positioning disability as a catalyzing experience for individual growth. I examine disability and critique ability privileging in Anglophone children’s literature from the Victorian era into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in a wide range of children’s fiction and life writing from British, American, and Australian literary traditions. Other research areas include Francophone children’s literature, boyhood studies, and the Robinsonade tradition (castaway novels.) My article, “Disability and the Evasion of Color in Theodore Taylor’s The Cay,” appears in Children’s Literature in Education.

I have taught surveys in British and world literature, an upper-division course on carceral experiences in young adult literature, and a writing through media course on food studies. I currently lead the Disability Reading Group, a graduate reading group that meets to discuss topics in critical disability studies.