I hold a Master of Arts in English, and a Ph.D. in Literary Studies. My work as a dancer and yoga teacher (RYT-200) richly informs my academic research. I've continued to use my interest in the human body to shape how I view writing—fluid, embodied, a performance of self. As a scholar of 20th Century American Literature with interests in embodied performance, I research the intersection of dance, gender, performance, and literature. I closely explore the links between language and kinesthetic movement/expression, arguing that women use forms of kinesthetic action and expressive movement to convey what cannot be fully said.

Dissertation Abstract

This project explores the connections between modern dance and modernism Though initially, these connections might seem inchoate, modern dance provides a way to consider how expressive movement in modernism and gender restrictions prompts a physical response. Dance is inherently stylistic movement, and it is vital to explore how movement offers women a way to engage or respond to modernity. By investigating the role of movement in modernist literature and the particular tension between constraint and freedom that characterized female movement during this period, I argue that expressive movement and embodied performance offers a means of self-exploration and self-actualization. 

Read my essay on Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.  

Abstract

In Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, each woman possesses a unique form of mobility, which informs her understanding of home. The “home” is characterized as an anchor, a stationary monument that operates as a place of confinement, a point of return, or a destructive space. This chapter explores three generations of women in Housekeeping and their position and displacement in the home. An analysis of womanhood evaluates the influence of matriarchal mobility in the domestic sphere and how it yields generational displacement by producing women who are either resistant to or adamant about prescribed gendered identity. Ultimately, this chapter demonstrates how the home acts as a place grounded in heteronormativity, which creates a palpable atmosphere of generational displacement affecting each woman, and explores how resistance manifests out of gendered oppression in the home-place.

Read my book review on Jane M. Gaines' work.

Excerpt

In Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries?, Jane M. Gaines delves into the history of early cinema, hoping to discov‐ er answers about the roles women played in silent films. Focusing on the women who were present in the US silent film industry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she posits the ques‐ tion: “What happened?” While this question initially frames Gaines’s argument, it is actually not her primary focus. (Click the image to read more.)