About My Research
Working at the intersection of literature, history, and cultural studies, my research examines how gendered embodiment is constructed and perceived through visual and performative cultures. I approach these questions through a feminist and archival lens, seeking to recover and reinterpret the overlooked contributions of American women writers to the broader landscape of nineteenth-century cultural expression.
My dissertation project examines the understudied relationship of postbellum, American women writers to performance. Shown across their live expression and fictional representations, American women’s relationship to performance exposes the harmful types of gendered embodiment that circulated in the public imaginary through the theatre and literary spheres. American women writers, alongside identifying these types, critiqued the idea that public perception, specifically in the way it constructs an ocular centric sense of truth about identity, is not enough to encapsulate their intersectional, gendered experiences. I thus argue that women writers generated, with the expression of their bodies, a different way of relating to the gendered self, one that they have not experienced before but are produced in the imaginary and material site of performance. This project fundamentally explores what it means for American women to be looked at, to be publicly known, and to resist, within and against, commonsense views held by the public that reinforce gendered social and political inequality.
Research Experience
Research Assistant to Carla Kaplan’s biography on Jessica Mitford, Troublemaker: The Fierce and Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, 2025
Project Assistant to the Henry David Thoreau Journal Drawings Archive
Research Assistant to Stephen Monroe’s book project on the rhetorics of prep culture in the south
Elisa Fuhrken 