Education
BA, Honours, English & Drama, with High Distinction, University of Toronto
BEd, English, Drama, & French, University of Toronto
MA, English, Concordia University
PhD, English, Rutgers University
My research interests include eighteenth-century literature, gender and sexuality, and humour studies. My first book, The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy shows how the various private rooms known as closets shaped extrafamilial relationships in eighteenth-century Britain, including the strangely virtual intimacies of print, the first mass medium.
My current research project, tentatively titled “Flayed: Eighteenth-Century Satire and Twenty-First-Century Un/Laughter,” explores the ongoing impact of eighteenth-century British satire on twenty-first-century North American comedy and humour discourse. This research has especially benefited from the talks, performances, and workshops I’ve organized and co-organized for Concordia’s Feminism and Humour working group.
Research, teaching, and supervision interests
17th- & 18th-century literature & culture
satire & humour studies
gender & sexuality
feminist cultural studies
intimacy & affect
print culture & media shift
material culture
pedagogy
Book
The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020.
Essays
"Satire and Offensive Humor," Options for Teaching Modern British and American Satire, eds. Evan Davis and Nicholas D. Nace, Modern Language Association Press, 2019.
“Toward a Humor-Positive Feminism: Lessons from the Sex Wars," Online: Los Angeles Review of Books (17 December 2017) and Print: Special Issue: Comedy, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal 17 (February 2018), 48-57.
“Coming Out: Closet Rhetoric and Media Publics,” History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History 5.1 (Spring 2015) 31-64.
"The Literature and Culture of the Closet in the Eighteenth-Century: A Pedagogical Resource,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe and his Contemporaries 6.1 (October 2014) 70-94.
"Intimate Points: The Dash in the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin,” Papers on Language and Literature 49.4 (2013) 1-29.
"Female Favouritism, Orientalism, and the Bathing Closet in Memoirs of Count Grammont," Eighteenth Century Fiction 24.1 (2011) 1-30.
"Lady Mary’s Imperfect Employment,” Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640-18301 (2011)1-23.
"Sodomy, Geography, and Misdirection in Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure," Special ed. Novelists on the Novel / La Poétique des romanciers, Eds. Isabelle Daunais and Allan Hepburn. University of Toronto Quarterly 79.4 (2010) 1035-1045.
"Carriages, Conversation, and A Sentimental Journey," Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 35 (2006) 243-66.
Reviews
With Joseph Drury, McKenzie Lee, The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue.The Eighteenth Century Commons (April 2018).
Claude Rawson, Swift's Angers, Eighteenth-Century Studies 49.1 (Fall 2015) 104-106.
Chloe Wigston Smith, Women, Work, and Clothes in the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 27.2 (January 2015) 309-311.
"Belle: A New View of Eighteenth-Century Racism," ABO Public: Interactive Forum for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 (August 25 2014).
with Meredith Evans, “Why We Love Paulo Sorrentino’s This Must Be the Place," Lemon Hound (September 27 2013).
