I am an Assistant Professor of English at American University of Sharjah (AUS) in the United Arab Emirates, where I teach courses in American Literature, book culture and literary studies, public speaking, and research writing. I completed my Ph.D. in the Department of English at New York University with specializations in early American and 19^th century literature, book history and print culture, digital and spatial humanities, and literature of the Black Atlantic. I earned an M.A. in English at the University of Delaware and a B.S. in Secondary Education from Northwestern University.

My scholarship engages broadly with the materiality of literature and writing and has developed along two paths. The first path examines how material aspects of book spaces engage with forms of local culture, practices of reading, and conceptions of literary value. My research has examined the spatial and print dimensions of the nineteenth-century New York City bookstore, tracing how the bookstore — as a building, a business, and a social space — shaped models of literary practice, market engagement, and urban leisure. This work has been published in Book History and the Oxford History of Popular Print Culture. This work is extended into the 20th and 21st centuries and into the spatial dimensions of street bookselling and book catalogues in my minigraph, The Spaces of Bookselling: Stores, Streets, and Pages (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

My interest in book culture and the material aspects of literature also includes the ways in which digital environments have transformed bookselling, the study of book culture, and the practices of reading and writing — the second path of my work. My bookstores project critically engages with GIS and mapping as a method for book history research. And my literature and writing classes regularly incorporate digital humanities tools, including social annotation, computational text analysis, and multi-modal writing, to reflect on the ways that digital technologies shape the experience of reading and writing. With colleagues, I have published on collaborative digital multimodal composition and integrating technology in ESL classrooms, as well as given talks and workshops focused on implementing digital humanities pedagogy in international liberal arts institutions.

Prior to arriving at AUS, I worked in secondary education teaching English in grades 9-12, designing English and humanities curriculum, and developing interdisciplinary collaboration and project-based learning opportunities.