Lecturer, Humanities Core Program
School of Humanities

US literature and culture; literary domesticity; architecture, decoration, and landscape design in literature; material culture studies

My research focuses on long nineteenth century American literature and culture. My book project, Dwelling in Possibility: The Material Culture of American Literary Domesticity, reads fictional houses against their historical architectural prototypes to identify moments of nineteenth-century American domestic innovation that contested, stretched, or redirected the nascent culture of domesticity. Authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Helen Hunt Jackson, Charles Chesnutt, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, writing about places with which they were intimately familiar, did not locate their intricate plots in generic house-shaped boxes. My “architectural readings” examine their complexly rendered literary houses as objects of material culture whose design, fabrication, and patterns of use make visible changing social relations at particular historical moments. By taking overlooked details of dwelling seriously, Dwelling in Possibility reveals the spatial context of power, class, race, and gender relations unfolding within particular architectural forms—Georgian I-Houses, Spanish adobes, Tidewater cottages—to challenge teleological accounts of American domesticity as a coherent precursor to modern experimentation. My ongoing research interests include literary domesticity; material culture studies; space, place and mobility studies; spatial humanities; and vernacular architecture, decorative arts, and landscape design in literature.

“Boardinghouse Fiction and the American Family in the Boarding-House of the Seven Gables,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 4.2 (October 2016).

“Landless Whites, Dual-Class Identification, and Sutpen’s Sub-Design,” Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, 68.1-2 (Winter-Spring 2015): 99-118.

“‘A far-off speck that looked like daylight’: McDougal’s Cave and the Vagaries of Discovery in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” The Mark Twain Annual, 10 (November 2012): 55-70.

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https://faculty.uci.edu/profile/?facultyId=6192

Last updated
12/14/2017