Current Position

Assistant Professor, English Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, since August 2004

Ph.D. Brown University, English, 2000
A Curious Literature: Reading the Medical Case History from the Royal Society to Freud
Robert Scholes, Nancy Armstrong, Tamar Katz

M.A. University of Virginia, English, 1992
B.A. Yale University, English, 1988, magna cum laude, with distinction in English

Publications

Articles

"Some Body's Story: The Novel as Instrument." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 42.1/2 (Winter 2009, forthcoming special issue on "Theories of the Novel Now"): 3819 words.

"Diagnosis or Detour? The Use of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novl." RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 49 (February 2008, special issue on "Interdisciplinarity and the Body," ed. Pamela Gilbert): 9602 words.

" 'Poor Hoo Loo': Sentiment, Stoicism, and the Grotesque in British Imperial Medicine." Victorian Freaks. Ed. Marlene Tromp. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008. 79-113.

"The Ghost in the Clinic: Gothic Medicine and Curious Fiction in Samuel Warren's Diary of a Late Physician ," Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (Sep 2004): 327-51.

" Syphilis and the Hysterical Female: The Limits of Realism in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins ," Women's Writing , 11.2 (June 2004): 259-80.

Other Publications

Review of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture , by Martha Stoddard Holmes. Literature and Medicine , 25.1 (Spring 2006): 172-75

Review of Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body , by Anna Krugovoy Silver. Victorian Studies 47.2 (Winter 2005): 285-86.

"Hester Salusbury Thrale (Mrs. Piozzi)," Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature , ed. David Scott Kastan. Oxford: Oxford UP (forthcoming).

"Medicine: Between Literature and Science," ASBH Exchange 7.7 (Summer 2004): 3, 9.

Annotations of texts by Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), George Eliot (Middlemarch), Djuna Barnes (Nightwood). Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, ten-year anniversary print edition (NYU: 2003).

Annotations of Jane Austen (Emma, Persuasion, and Sense and Sensibility);
Charles Dickens ("A Curious Dance around a Curious Tree");
Arthur Conan Doyle ( “The Case of Lady Sannox” and “The Black Doctor");
George Eliot (Adam Bede and “The Lifted Veil”);
Henry James (“Daisy Miller,” “The Figure in the Carpet,” and “The Turn of the Screw”);
Rudyard Kipling (Kim);
Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (Marcella);
Samuel Warren (Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician).
Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database, <http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db>, 51st edition (Oct 2003).
Annotations of critical texts: Margaret Healy (Fictions of Disease); William H. Helfand (Quack, Quack, Quack); Alison Winter (Mesmerized); Sarah Winter (Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge) .

“Language Experiments and Scientific Fads.” Rev. of Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study, by Tim Armstrong. Journal of Medical Humanities, 22.2 (Summer 2001).

“Hermaphrodites: Or, How Modern Medicine Constructed the Single-Sex Body.” Rev. of Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex, by Alice Domurat Dreger. Journal of Medical Humanities, 22.2 (Summer 2001).

"Fact and Fancy? Medicine in Dickens's Periodicals," MLA (Modern Language Association), San Francisco, CA, December 2008 (forthcoming)

"When Reading is Seeing: Microscopic Writing and the Creation of Wonder," NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Society), New Haven, CT, November 2008 (forthcoming)

"Adulteration and the Microscope: The Limits of Realism," HSS (History of Science Society), Pittsburgh, PA, November 2008 (forthcoming)

"Recording or Reproducing Sensation? The Novel as Instrument," Theories of the Novel Now: A Conference in Celebration of Forty Years of NOVEL , Providence, RI, November 2007 (forthcoming)

"The Vastness of the Very Small: Imperialist Discourses in Nineteenth-Century British Microscopy," HSS (History of Science Society), Washington, D.C., November 2007 (forthcoming)

"George Eliot's skeptical ideal: Mechanical observation as realist vision in Adam Bede ," NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association), Vancouver, October 2007 (forthcoming)

"The Sphygmograph and the Physician: Writing -- and Reading -- the Language of the Body," Minds Bodies Machines, Birkbeck, University of London, July 2007

"The Rejection of Invention: Mechanical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Medical Narrative," INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) Conference, Kansas City, April 2007

"Diagnosis or Detour: The Uses of Medical Realism in the Victorian Novel," for special session on "Interdisciplinarity and the Body," NAVSA, Purdue, 2006

"Instructive and Beautiful Objects": Victorian Women Writing Popular Science, BWWC (British Women Writers Conference), Gainesville, 2006

"That most beautiful piece of mechanism, an eye: Microscope Teachings in Gosse and Darwin," NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association) Conference, Charlottesville, 2005

"Realism as a Masquerade: India as Curiosity in Kim ," Narrative, Louisville, April 2005

"Popular Science: Literary Medical Knowledge and the 1850s Athenaeum ," SAHMS (Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science), Augusta, 2005.

"The Limits of Realist Medicine: Fever and Gaskell's Ruth," NAVSA (North American Victorian Studies Association" Conference, Toronto, 2004

“Medicine: Between Literature and Science” Roundtable, MLA, San Diego, 2003

“The Making of Imperial Manhood: Muscular Christianity in Tom Brown's Schooldays and Oakfield,” Northeast Conference on British Studies (NECBS), Tufts, 2003

“Serialization, Sensation, and the Sphygmograph,” Society for Literature and Science (SLS 2003), Austin, 2003

“Reading Between the Lines: Finding The Romance of Science in Victorian Medicine,” History and Literature Workshop on Interdisciplinarity (invited talk), Harvard University, 2003

“The Magic of Figures: Visual Narratives in the Nineteenth-Century Case History,” Visual Knowledges Conference, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, 2003

“`A True Prophet': Gothic Medicine and the Limits of Vision in George Eliot's 'The Lifted Veil,'” 18th- and 19th-Century British Women Writers Conference: "Evolving Domains of Knowledge and Representation," Madison, 2002

“The Magic of Figures: Visual Narratives in the Clinical Case History,” Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Conference (INCS), George Mason University, 2002

“`Poor Hoo Loo': The Curious Narrative of Sentimental Medicine in Dickens and The Lancet,” Society for Literature and Science (SLS 2001): “Technologies, Bodies, Narratives,” Buffalo, 2001

“Medical Vision and the Novel of Sensibility,” Narrative: An International Conference, Rice University, Houston, 2001

“`Interesting Case of Catalepsy': The Interruption of Subjectivity in the Medical Case History,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, Washington, D.C., 2000

“`I groaned within for the victim': Statistics, Sensibility, and the Gendered Etiology of Childbed Fever,” Narrative: An International Conference, Hanover, NH, 1999

“Dora, the Gendering of Narrative, and the `rights of the gynaecologist,'” Narrative: An International Conference, Evanston, IL, 1998

“Mapping `an unnavigable river': Freud's Case History and the Autobiographical Narrative,” Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, Toronto, 1997

“From the Syphilitic to the Hysteric: Gender, Disease, and Society in Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins,” Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Conference, Philadelphia, 1997

Committee on Faculty Research Support (COFRS) Summer Research Grant, Florida State University, 2007
Wood Fellowship, Francis C. Wood Institute, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, 2005
First-Year Assistant Professor Grant, Florida State University, 2005
Research and Creativity Award, Florida State University English Department, 2004, 2006
Brown University Research Fellowship, Summer 1998
Brown University Tuition Award, Fall 1997
President's Award for Excellence in Teaching, Brown University, 1996
Brown University Research Fellowship, Fall 1996
Mellon Dissertation Seminar in Literature and History, Brown University (Mary Gluck), Summer 1996
duPont Fellowship, University of Virginia, Fall 1991 – Spring 1992 (declined)
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for Schoolteachers:
“Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, Yeats,” Harvard University (Helen Vendler), 1989
Schoenberg Prize for best thesis on American poetry, Yale University, 1988

Editorial and Research Experience

Proposal Reviewer for Broadview Press, 2005, 2007
Manuscript Reviewer for Studies in the Novel , 2007; PMLA , 2006; Literature Compass , 2006; Nineteenth-Century Studies, 2005; Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies , 2005-2008; and Victorian Studies , 2005
Compiler, "Victorian Bibliography," Victorian Studies , 2003-2006
Book Review Editor, Journal of Medical Humanities , 2000-present
Co-Editor/Annotator, Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database , <http://endeavor.med.nyu.edu/lit-med/lit-med-db>, 2000-present
Brown University, Department of Modern Culture and Media, Research Assistant for Robert Scholes. Studied T.S. Eliot's changes to Djuna Barnes's manuscript of Nightwood, archived at Djuna Barnes Library, Special Collections, University of Maryland. Summer 1993.

Teaching Experience

Assistant Professor, English Department, Florida State University, Tallahassee, August 2004

Victorian British Literature
British Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century
Nineteenth-century British Novel
Women in Literature: Victorian Women Writers
Victorian Periodicals and Serial Fiction (graduate course)
Gender and Disease in the Victorian Novel (graduate course)
Realism, Visuality, and Objectivity in the Victorian Novel (graduate course)
The New Woman in 1890s British Literature (graduate directed independent study)

Tutor, Harvard University, Program in History and Literature, 2002 - 2004

Sophomore Tutorial Seminar: Modern British Literature and Culture (co-teaching with John Mackey, historian)
Reading the British Empire (junior tutorial)
Gender and Medievalism in William Morris (senior tutorial and thesis advisor)
Fin-de-siècle in Britain and France (junior tutorial)
(The department offers mostly tutorial [one-on-one] courses).

Visiting Assistant Professor, Trinity College (Connecticut) English Department, 2000 - 2002

Undergraduate:
Literature of Colonialism: Past and PostLiterature of Colonialism, Past and Post
Culture of Literary Modernisms: Making the Modernist Novel, or Making the Novel Modernist (1859-1931)
British Literature 1700 - Present
Introduction to Literary Studies

Graduate:
Thesis Colloquium
Contexts and Methods for the Study of Literature (literary theory survey)
Theories of Romance and Gender in the Nineteenth Century Novel (group independent study)

Teaching Assistant, Brown University English Department, 1992 - 1998

Courses Independently Designed and Taught:
British Literature Since 1688 (required for the English major), Spring 1996
American Literature Since 1865, Spring 1995
Modernism and Gender (Seminar in Writing, Literature, and Culture), Fall 1994
Dear Diary: Journals and “The Literary” (Seminar in Writing, Literature, and Culture), Spring 1994
Writing on the Edge: Transgressive Genres (Writing and Style), Fall 1993
The Epistolary Novel (Writing and Style), Spring 1993
Visions of the City: The Essay and the City (Writing and Style), Fall 1992

Course Assisted:
Shakespeare, Spring 1998

Theses directed

Masters
Peter Larkin Romaneski, Florida State University, Place and Power in the Gothic Novel, 2008-2009 (current)
Virginia Brown, Trinity College, "Revisiting the Green World: The Struggle for Female Autonomy in the Film Adaptations of Jane Austen's Novels," 2002

Senior
Carolyn Hammer, Harvard University, "Making It Medieval: Collaboration and the Construction of Gender in the Work of William Morris," 2004
Matthew Anderson, Trinity College, "Dual Identity in Joseph Conrad's Novels," 2002

Thesis committees

Doctoral:
Jenny Caneen-Raja, FSU, "Infictions and Outlawed Bodies: Vagrancy, Syphilis, and the Centrality of the Marginal in English Renaissance Drama," defense March 2008
Allison McEntire, FSU, "Consumption" (novel), 2007

Masters:
Elizabeth Jackson, FSU, defense Spring 2009
Roger Turnau, FSU, "The Beagle's Last Voyage" (novel), defense April 2008
Samantha Muka, FSU (History and Philosophy of Science), "Religious Reactions to the Syphilis Epidemic in America 1900-1914," defense April 2008
Meghan Burke, FSU, "Mothers, Monsters, Machines: Unnatural Maternities in Late Eighteenth-Century British Women's Writing," 2007
Kelly Bryan Smith, FSU, "Solitary Rambles and Stifling Sickrooms:   Disease and Gender in Jane Austen's Fiction," 2007
Lauren Murphey, FSU, "Patriarchal Structures in Gothic Short Fiction, 1770-1820," 2006
Jennifer Van Vliet, FSU, "The Literary Context of Maria Edgeworth's Jason Quirk," 2006

Academic Service

Co-organized English Department Literature Colloquium, "Performing the Material Text," October 2008
Library Committee, English Department, Florida State University, 2007-present
Executive Committee, English Department, Florida State University, 2006-07
Nineteenth-Century American search committee, English Department, Florida State University, 2006-07
Evaluation Committee, English Department, Florida State University, 2006
Co-organized English Department cluster hiring proposal on English, History, and Medicine, 2005
Co-organized English Department Colloquium on "Literature, Visual Culture, and Media Studies," 2005
Literature Committee, Florida State University, 2004, 2007
Women's Studies Committee, Florida State University, 2004-2006
Committee on Instruction, History and Literature Program, Harvard University, 2003-2004
Common Curriculum Subcommittee, History and Literature Program, Harvard University, Summer 2003
Graduate Studies Committee, Trinity College, 2001-2002
Coordinated panel on “Sentiment and Sensibility: Narrative Cultures in Medical Texts,” Narrative: An International Conference, Hanover, NH, 1999
Coordinated panel on “Modernist Communities,” Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA) Conference, Baltimore, 1998.
English Department Liaison, Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning, Brown University, 1993-1995
Individualized Teaching Consultant, Sheridan Center, Brown University, 1994

Research and Teaching Interests

Victorian literature and culture, theory and history of the British novel, Victorian medicine and science, visual culture, literature and medicine, fiction of empire, genre studies, gender theory

Last updated October 2008

Home