Writing

In addition to my writing about creative women, I publish on topics related to teaching, creativity, and literacy.

Writing About Teaching & Learning

Writing About Teaching & Learning •

  • Cultivating Creative Habits

    Chapter forthcoming in Quick Hits: Creativity in the Classroom, eds. Julie Goodspeed-Chadwick, Michael Morrone, and Deborah Whaley. Indiana University Press.

    Cultivating a learning environment in which creativity is a core value enhances student engagement. Yet, in order to truly empower students to think and act creatively, we as instructors must carve out space daily for our students to cultivate creativity as a habit of mind.

  • "I hear it now"; or, Teaching Students to Read Poems in Novels

    Essay forthcoming in Teaching Poetry Now, eds. Caroline Gelmi & Lizzy LeRud, SUNY Press. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

    How do we read poems embedded in novels, and how do we convince students that this generic navigation is a labor worth undertaking? Unprompted, students are likely to (at best) skim or (at worst) skip a poem entirely when it interrupts the prose of their assigned novel. This reading malpractice is not without consequences!

  • Communities of Correspondence: Compassionate Peer Review in a Post-Pandemic World

    Essay forthcoming in Teaching Community College and Historically Underserved Students: Innovative, Inclusive, and Compassionate Pedagogy, eds. Melissa Dennihy & Zivah Patel, Palgrave Macmillan. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

    In this essay, we propose a two-pronged, hybrid peer review strategy that both establishes and reifies the classroom as a compassionate learning environment.

  • Learning Environments

    Reference entry forthcoming in Constructing the Threshold: A Reference Work of Concepts between Teaching for Transfer and Teaching Writing, eds. Tom Skeen, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen. WAC Clearinghouse/University of Colorado Press.

  • Genre

    Reference entry forthcoming in Constructing the Threshold: A Reference Work of Concepts between Teaching for Transfer and Teaching Writing, eds. Tom Skeen, Sherry Rankins-Robertson, and Duane Roen. WAC Clearinghouse/University of Colorado Press, forthcoming. Co-authored with Annelise Norman.

  • A View from the ALPs: Teaching-Track Faculty and the Pedagogical Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors in the Active-Learning Pods Model of Composition

    Essay forthcoming in 2024 Conference on College Composition and Communication Companion.

  • Picture This: The Pedagogical Value of Picture Books

    Fairy Tales in the College Classroom: Essays to Spark Lesson Plan Ideas Across the Curriculum, 2024.

    Picture books, I argue, should be positioned as appropriate and legitimate objects of study for young adult readers and writers in both secondary and collegiate contexts. In this chapter, I discuss picture books’ pedagogical value on three fronts: multimodality, accessibility, and diversity.

  • Centers for Teaching and Learning: Investing in Your Teaching as a Graduate Student

    Xchanges: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Technical Communication, Writing/Rhetoric, and Writing Across the Curriculum, 2024.
    Co-authored with Sarah Pedzinski.

    We discuss how CTLs shaped our identities as teaching professionals and encourage readers, especially graduate students early in their teaching careers, to leverage the different kinds of resources CTLs have to offer.

  • Syllabus Blues? Try Reciprocal Peer Review

    The Teaching Professor, 2023.
    Co-authored with Sarah Pedzinski.

    Peer-reviewing syllabi with colleagues can allow you to create meaningful reciprocal relationships and leverage advanced novice thinking to improve your own course.

  • Learning to Cut & Paste

    Literacy & NCTE Blog, 2022.

    In this back-to-school blog post, I share what I learned from K-12 teachers about how to make paragraph structures more visible to first-year writing students.

Writing in the Humanities

Writing in the Humanities •

  • Blood and Soap: Kenneth Anger, Karina Longworth, and the Women of Hollywood Babylon

    Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse, and Resistance in the Dream Factory
    Forthcoming

    I explore the impact of Anger’s work on the construction of an Old Hollywood mythos predicated upon the gore and glamour of women’s suffering. I model how to critically read Hollywood Babylon’s rhetorics of violence. Additionally, I consider as a response to Hollywood Babylon Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This (2014-present), a revisionist history that invites public (re)access to Hollywood history while providing tools for the critical interrogation of its gossip.

  • "This is a true story": Women Artists and Narratives of Disability in Ida Lupino’s Never Fear

    Women Who Write Our Worlds: Shaping Global Screen Culture
    Forthcoming

    This essay considers Lupino’s evocative Never Fear (1950) as a meditation not just on the polio epidemic and the fear it inspired in the public but also on the ways in which such a disease could disrupt, delay, and even paralyze the lives of working women, particularly women artists.

  • The Comeback of Miriam Hopkins

    Comebacks: The Return of the Aging Film Star
    Forthcoming

    The commercial failures of The Comeback (variously known as Hollywood Horror House and Savage Intruder), do not negate its important status as Hopkins’ final feature film, one that self-consciously centralizes a sixty-seven-year-old Hopkins’ ability to perform the true-to-life role of an aged and reclusive actor.

  • Mary Blair and the Making of Cinderella

    'The Story of ‘Once Upon a Time’: A Celebration of 100 Years of Disney
    Forthcoming

    Blair’s concept art for Cinderella provides a clear case study for understanding her creative process, as well as her position as an artist worth celebrating.

  • Examining the Legacy of Disney Artist Mary Blair

    Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
    July 2024

    While this article contextualises Blair’s artistic development and her contributions to various Disney projects, I primarily interrogate how Blair’s career and legacy have been narrativised, particularly in the decades following her death, by Disney-sanctioned writers and for readers of all ages. This paper invites us to consider why Mary Blair, more than any other woman active at Disney during the mid-twentieth century, has achieved more fame and fan recognition since her death than she did in life. The answer, I argue, lies in how Blair is positioned in writing.

  • Monster Mash: Universal Pictures and the Frankenstein Film Adaptations

    Critical Insights: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus
    March 2024

    A crash course on film adaptation and Universal horror written or high school and undergraduate students.

  • Frida: Creativity, Trauma, & the Woman Artist

    A Critical Companion to Julie Taymor
    December 2023

    This essay considers art and creativity as forces for healing and self-expression following moments of intense personal and physical trauma as reflected in Taymor’s film and in its reception post #MeToo.

  • The Miscarriage of Frida Kahlo

    Nursing Clio
    December 2023

    What the film and its dramatization of Kahlo’s pregnancy loss ultimately reveals is that we have made-- and continue to make-- Frida Kahlo’s body our business.

  • Elizabeth Taylor

    Senses of Cinema
    November 2023

    Not unlike her contemporary Marilyn Monroe, it sometimes seems like Elizabeth Taylor’s multifacetedness transcends the capabilities of life writing: how are we to reduce women so iconic, so visually ubiqitous, into words?

  • Mary Blair & Kate Greenaway

    The Literary Encyclopedia
    July 2023

    I contributed two biographical essays to The Literary Encyclopedia in response to a call for entries on authors and illustrators of children's books. My entry on Disney concept artist and Little Golden Books illustrator Mary Blair is part of my ongoing scholarship on the artist. My entry on Greenaway reflects my interest in Victorian women artists and illustrators.

  • Wyler's Wuthering Heights: Genre, Transnationalism, and the Adaptation of the Victorian Novel

    Refocus: The Films of William Wyler
    March 2023

    I discuss William Wyler’s approach to adapting the classic Victorian novel, including wht drew Wyler to Brontë’s fictional realm in the first place, as well as the generic consequences of this transnational film adaptation.

  • To Ride Into 'Paradise': Lana Del Rey's EP at 10

    PopMatters
    December 2022

    What’s most striking about Lana Del Rey’s Paradise EP and its music videos are the ways they cement her transgressive and hallucinatory aesthetic.

Imperialized Antiquities: Victorian Encounters with the Ancient Near East in the British Museum

My dissertation examined the relationship between Victorian Britain and the Ancient Near East as produced and mediated through the British Museum. I considered how this encyclopedic museum narrativized antiquity for consumption by British spectators in an imperial context. This project unveils the layers of narrative that inform and are informed by the discovery, acquisition, and reception of artifacts from Ancient Lycia and Assyria. These narratives ultimately reveal the relationship between British imperial archaeology and the museum space. In addition, I showcased how these institutional practices and spaces illuminated Victorian Britain’s place within the Great Chain of Empires initiated by their Assyrian predecessors.

Doctoral Dissertation

Book Reviews

Film Reviews

Lists

Book Reviews • Film Reviews • Lists •

I have contributed criticism to both public-facing and academic venues. My reviews of fiction and nonfiction titles— many of which are related to my interests in the stories we tell about creative women— have appeared or are forthcoming in venues ranging from American Book Review, Harvard Review, and Necessary Fiction to Film Quarterly and Woman's Art Journal.

  • Andrea Karnes, ed., Women Painting Women

    Woman's Art Journal
    forthcoming

  • Valerie Werder, Thieves

    American Book Review
    forthcoming

  • Jeanne Mackin, Picasso's Lovers

    Harvard Review
    forthcoming

  • Milan Hain, Starmaker: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in the Hollywood Studio System

    New Review of Film & Television Studies
    June 2024

  • Claire Sisco King, Mapping the Stars: Celebrity, Metonymy, and the Networked Politics of Identity

    Journal of Popular Culture
    May 2024

  • Virginia Pye, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann

    Necessary Fiction
    April 2024

  • Lois Banner, Ideal Beauty: The Life and Times of Greta Garbo

    Film Quarterly
    February 2024

  • Evelyn McDonnell, The World According to Joan Didion

    PopMatters
    February 2024

  • Catherine Russell, The Cinema of Barbara Stanwyck

    PopMatters
    January 2024

  • Jazmina Barrera, Cross-Stitch

    Necessary Fiction
    January 2024

  • Victorian Literature on Film: The 1930s

    Video Librarian
    January 2024

  • Robert Dance, Ferocious Ambition: Joan Crawford's March to Stardom

    PopMatters
    December 2023

  • Ruby Blondell, Helen of Troy in Hollywood

    Popular Culture Studies Journal
    October 2023

  • Feminist Film Theory: An Introductory Reading List

    JSTOR Daily
    September 2023

  • Richard Abel, ed., Movie Mavens: US Newspaper Women Take on the Movies, 1914-1923

    Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
    August 2023

  • Mary K. Holland & Heather Hewett, eds., #MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Violence and Rape Culture

    Feminist Pedagogy
    August 2023

  • Body Parts

    Video Librarian
    August 2023

  • Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers' Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration

    Victoriographies: A Journal of the Long Nineteenth Century
    July 2023

  • Love, Barbara

    Video Librarian
    June 2023

  • Keri Watson & Timothy W. Hiles, The Routledge Companion to Art and Disability

    Visual Studies
    June 2023

  • Silent Beauty

    Video Librarian
    May 2023

  • Feminist Art History: An Introductory Reading List

    JSTOR Daily
    March 2023

  • Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760-1830

    ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830
    December 2022

  • Griselda Pollock, Killing Men & Dying Women: Imagining Difference in 1950s New York Painting and Three Women Artists: Expanding Abstract Expressionism in the American West by Amy Von Lintel & Bonnie Roos

    Woman's Art Journal
    November 2022