I’m a professor of film, media, and literary studies at the University of North Texas with particular research interests in classic Hollywood film, Victorian literature, and 1970s and 80s television.

I’ve currently got a lot of different writing, research, and editing logs in the fire, the two biggest of which are an in-progress film history monograph called Unwomaned!: Classic Hollywood Stardom and the Threat of Female Independence and a hybrid personal/critical book project I’ve recently started mapping out called Confessions of a Jiggle TV Feminist. I’ve also served as the editor-in-chief of the literary studies journal Studies in the Novel since 2017.

I originally hail from Philadelphia and hold degrees from Harvard University (A.B.) and the University of Southern California (M.A., Ph.D.). My parents named me after Nora Charles (a.k.a. Myrna Loy, pictured below) from The Thin Man, which probably made my obsession with fabulous old movies inevitable.