Education

PhD, University of South Carolina
MFA, University of South Carolina
MA, Wake Forest University
BA, Wake Forest University

Areas of Specialization

20^th and 21^st Century American Literature
American Women Writers
Fat Studies
Creative Nonfiction Writing
Medical Humanities
Gender Studies

Courses Taught

SAEL 200: Social Advocacy and Ethical Life
ENGL 101: Critical Reading and Composition
ENGL 102: Rhetoric and Composition
SPCH 145: Online Public Communication

Selected Awards

Bridge Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship (2020-2023)
Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020)
Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize (2018)
Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award, University of South Carolina (2016)

Publications

Books
   • Her Abjection/My Self: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Twentieth-Century American Literature. Forthcoming from University of Georgia Press in early 2028.
   • Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. Autumn House Press, 2019. *Winner of the 2018 Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize

Articles/Chapters
   • “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Fat and Stigmatizing Rhetoric in Medical Records.” In Weight Bias in Health Education: Critical Perspectives for Pedagogy and Practice. Edited by Heather Brown and Nancy Ellis-Ordway. Routledge, 2021.
   • “‘I Ain’t You’: Fat and the Female Body in Flannery O’Connor.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2020).
   • “Equilibrium, or My Mother Would Have Felt the Same Way.” The Boiler Journal. January 1, 2016.

Presentations

  • “‘I Don’t Think You’re Ready for This Jelly’: Mothers, Daughters, and the Gelatinous Body in 20th Century Literature by Women Writers.” 2025 Triennial Conference of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, November 7, 2025.
  • “Fat Girls, Abjection, and Epiphany in Flannery O’Connor.” Flannery O'Connor's Second Century: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities at Georgia College and State University, September 12-15, 2024. Conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
  • “A Fat-Positive Reading of O’Connor.” Invited speaker for a Zoom event sponsored by the Flannery O’Connor Institute for the Humanities, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Georgia College & State University, February 1, 2024. 
   • Guest author in Federica Schoeman’s graduate class “‘Cherchez la femme!’: A Feminist (Hence Disruptive) Study of the Western Intellectual Canon” (ENGL 803) to speak about my book. University of South Carolina, April 17, 2023.
   • “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Combatting Fat Stigma in the Medical Industry, the University, and Beyond.” South Carolina State University, September 18, 2020.
   • “The Medical Gaze, Trauma, and Heteroglossia in Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story.” Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues. Johns Hopkins University, November 15, 2019.
   • Excerpts from Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., April 19, 2019. Panel chair.
   • “A Summer of Spillage: My Father’s Gastric Bypass and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Seattle, Washington, March 22, 2016. Panel chair.
   • “‘This thing that she had done to herself’; Female Mobility and Agency in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) National Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, March 4, 2016.
   • “Refiguring Fat Bodies: The U.S. ‘Obesity Epidemic’ and Grosz’s Volatile Bodies.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2, 2015.
   • “‘I’m split in two’: The Psychosexual Consequences of the Holocaust for two young girls – Anne Frank and Milena Roth.” Women and the Holocaust: Cultural Productions and Interpretations – The 17^th Annual Comparative Literature Conference at University of South Carolina, March 2, 2015.
   • “‘That was them not us’; Adrienne Rich’s Post-9/11 Political Poetry and the Frames of War.” “I Live Here!: Negotiating Notions of Public and Private” Conference at North Carolina State University, February 23, 2013.
   • “Breaking the Frames in Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins.” Peace & Nuclear Non-Proliferation: A World of No Nukes?: An Interdisciplinary Conference at Guilford College, February 16, 2013.

Research

I am currently working on my second book, Her Abjection/My Self: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Twentieth-Century American Literature, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2028. 

In Western patriarchal culture, a woman’s worth (on the job market, on the marriage market, in everyday interactions with strangers) is often measured by her ability to comply with hegemonic beauty ideals, and it has historically been the job of the mother to prepare her daughter to successfully navigate the misogynistic gauntlet of public opinion. Her Abjection/My Self: Mothers, Daughters, and the Body in Twentieth-Century American Literature argues that the works of American women writers dramatize the capacity of the leaky, malleable, mercurial female body to disrupt, rupture, and recuperate the mother-daughter relationship. On the one hand, mothers in these texts often enforce a social order that defines the body as excessive, abject, and in need of regulation. On the other hand, they themselves frequently embody that excess, becoming the engulfing and off-putting bodies that daughters want to reject. From Flannery O’Connor to Edwidge Danticat, the women writers in my study draw upon this ambivalence to cultivate a feminist poetics of the body that sees abjection as the shared state of mothers and daughters. Bringing together the insights of fat studies, critical race studies, and material feminism, Her Abjection/My Self proposes that abjection’s power to destabilize social constructions of gender, sexuality, and race creates the possibility of new relationships between mothers and daughters, escaping the painful dyad of self-hatred and maternal surveillance.       

From canonical second-wave feminist texts (like Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot and Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born) to recent scholarly studies (like Elizabeth Podnieks’ Maternal Modernisms and Gil Anidjar’s On the Sovereignty of Mothers), the mother-daughter relationship in literature and culture has been a focus of critical inquiry for decades. My project intervenes in this conversation by combining a feminist psychoanalytical framework (Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigary, Bracha L. Ettinger) with a new materialist perspective (Elizabeth Grosz, Kyla Wazana Tompkins) to trace the ways in which fluctuating societal beliefs in North America regarding the female body between the 1940s and the 1990s are reflected in literary representations of the mother-daughter relationship and consider how emerging trends in literary form furthered those representations. 

In four dual author chapters arranged chronologically, I use a psychoanalytical lens to investigate the intersubjective relationship between mothers and daughters who create one another through their fantasies, fears, and desires for the other person. I also find that these authors anticipate the insights of material feminism, fat studies, and Black feminism—theoretical approaches which propose that the flesh itself becomes a medium of productive excess. Through this combination of psychoanalysis and material feminisms, I examine both the construction of subjectivity through fantasy and narration as well as the role of the material body in that process—and indeed, in its unraveling. 

In addition to my scholarly research, I write creative nonfiction as well. My first book, Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story, draws on interdisciplinary fat theory and history. Bringing together experiences of personal and national trauma, I weave the tale of my father’s botched gastric bypass surgery and subsequent prolonged health crisis with the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. These intertwined narratives, both disasters that could have been avoided, reveal points of failure in our systems of healthcare and environmental conservation. Incorporating excerpts from medical records, journal entries, news stories, government documents, and other sources, I compose a mosaic of our modern anxieties and complicate the dominant discourse surrounding the “obesity epidemic” as I tell the story of my family, our bodies, and our very American history with fat. 

Limited by Body Habitus was awarded the 2018 Autumn House Press Nonfiction Prize.