name pronunciation: ee-liss-ah fer-ken

she/her/hers

I am a Doctoral Candidate in English literature at Northeastern University, specializing in nineteenth-century American literature (with a focus on women writers), performance studies, archival studies, and feminist theory. My dissertation, Rescripting the Body: Gender, Perception, and Performance in Nineteenth-Century America, 1865–1910, examines how American women writers reimagined embodied experience through literary and performative forms, articulating alternative modes of gendered selfhood in both imaginative and material spaces of performance.

I have more than eleven years of experience teaching college-level courses at the University of Mississippi, Northeastern University, and Harvard University, with expertise in literature, popular culture, performance, and gender studies.

Currently, I am working as a graduate editorial assistant at Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society and research assistant. I am one of the graduate project leaders of our feminist resistance project, Feminist Coalition Archival Project.

I obtained my M.A. in English, with a minor in Gender Studies, from the University of Mississippi, where I wrote my thesis, Gestures of Dissent: Self-Fashioning Performances from Southern Women Writers during the Fin de Siècle, and was nominated for the Sue Hart Prize for Best Paper in Gender Studies.