BOOKS

The overarching premise of my first book is that we can better understand the implicit, unofficial modes of regulation that governed the Victorian novel by studying them in conjunction with the excessively explicit modes that regulated Hays Code-era Hollywood film. In comparing these two extra-legal, market-driven forms of censorship, this book explores the paradoxical effects of prohibitive practices. Rather than being ruined by censorship, it argues, the novels written in Victorian England and films produced under the Production Code were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant to restrain them.

My second book argues that the strikingly persistent trope of female characters running away from some iteration of 'home' played a far more influential role in the histories of both the rise of the novel and the rise of modern feminism than previous accounts have acknowledged. Just as the #MeToo movement used the tool of repeated, aggregated storytelling to take a stand against contemporary rape culture, Gone Girls identifies and amplifies a recurrent strand of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British storytelling that served both to emphasize the prevalence of gendered injustices throughout the period and to narrativize potential ways and means for readers facing such injustices to rebel, resist, and get out.

This collection of essays that I coedited with Diana Bellonby and Tara MacDonald is the first literary-cultural history of gaslighting, a term derived from the haunting neo-Victorian play Gas Light (1938) that’s about a sadistic husband trying to make his wife believe she’s losing her mind. The collection traces the particular type of emotional abuse depicted in this play back to the Victorian era, when the idea of madness was debated, misused, policed, and medicalized like never before—and when the interlocking institutions of patriarchy, slavery, and imperialism sought to convince women, racialized others, and colonized subjects that their own perceptions were not to be trusted. More than anything, as the volume's wide-ranging analyses of both canonical and little-known Victorian texts demonstrate, gaslighting depends on the power to propagate a false narrative.

SELECTED ESSAYS

“What Counts and Doesn’t Count as Rape in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock.” In New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, ed. Michael Dango, Erin Spampinato, and Doreen Thierauf. SUNY Press, 2026.

“‘Whether the Women Like It or Not’: Reading Protectionist Gender Politics through the Lens of Gaslight Noir Film.” Solicited essay for “Gaslighting”-themed special issue of Social Research: An International Quarterly 93.1 (2026): 19-47.

“‘Strange Intonations’: The Foreign Accents of Disabling Mind Control in Trilby, Dracula, and the Two Film Versions of Gaslight.” In Victorian Gaslighting: Genealogy of an Injustice, ed. Diana Bellonby, Nora Gilbert, and Tara MacDonald. SUNY, 2026.

“‘Women with careers should be shot!’: Bette Davis and the Unwomaning Threat of Female Stardom.” Screen 65.4 (2024): 449-71.

“Shirley Temple’s ‘Baby Burlesks.’” In The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture, edited by Molly O’Donnell and Anne Stevens. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.

“Sex and the Storyworld: Narrativizing Desirability in the Early Films of Fred Astaire.” Journal of Narrative Theory 48.1 (2018): 29-52.

“A Servitude of One’s Own: Isolation, Authorship, and the Nineteenth-Century British Governess.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 69.4 (2015): 455-80.

“Thackeray, Sturges, and the Scandal of Censorship.” PMLA 127.3 (2012): 542-57.

“‘She Makes Love for the Papers’: Love, Sex, and Exploitation in Hitchcock’s Mata Hari Films.” Film & History 41.2 (2011): 6-18.