Regular Faculty

Summary of Expertise

19th-century British literature and culture, Irish literature and culture (19th-century to the present), the gothic, monsters, popular culture, adaptations and adaptation theory, fantasy

Research Interests

My work examines how British and Irish writers reimagine histories in and of the 19th century, focusing particularly on the political, aesthetic, and gendered forces that transform the past into familiar and useful history.  My monograph, entitled The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023), looks at the ways monster stories/poems by writers like Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, and Bram Stoker reflect on changing ideas about the form and function of history across the 19th century.  I'm co-editor (with Mike Cronin and Brian O'Conchubhair) of The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge 2021), co-editor (with Mary Mullen) of the forthcoming Race, Violence, and Form: The Referent of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool University Press, 2025), and my published essays have appeared in Victorian Studies, Irish Unversity Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Victorian Poetry, New Hibernia Review, and several edited collections and critical editions.

Biography, Education and Training

B.A. Stanford University, M.A. Stanford University, Ph.D. Princeton University

Honors, Awards and Grants

Maddock Research Fellowship, Marsh's Library, Dublin, Ireland, 2023-4

Principal Investigator, UC Online Course Redevelopment Grant, 2023-5

Principal Investigator, UCHRI Multicampus Faculty Working Group Grant, "Envisioning a New Monster Studies," 2023-4

Faculty Public Humanities, Digital, and Community-Engaged Research Fellowship, Santa Cruz MAH exhibition, "Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens, and Space Commandos: The Lost Worlds of Women Comics Artists," (UCSC), 2022-3

THI Faculty Research Grant (UCSC), 2022-3

Academic Senate Committee on Research Faculty Research Grant (UCSC), 2019-20, 2020-21, 2022-23

Principal Investigator, Monterey Peninsula Foundation Grant (“Dickens Day of Writing”), 2021-2

Principal Investigator, National Endowment for the Humanities ARP Grant (“A Different Universe, at UCSC and Beyond: The Dickens Project's 2022 Programs on Race, Inequality, and 19th-Century Literature”), 2021-2

UCHRI Residential Research Fellowship, “Artificial Humanity” (University of California), 2020

Hellman Fellowship (University of California), 2017-8

Institute for Humanities Research Faculty Fellowship (UCSC), 2017-8

Academic Senate Committee on Research Special Project Grant (UCSC), 2016-7

William B. Neenan, S.J. Visiting Fellowship (Boston College-Ireland), 2016

Selected Publications

Book

The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (The Ohio State University Press, 2023)

Edited Collection:

Co-editor (with Mary Mullen), Race, Violence, and Form: The Referent of Ireland in the Nineteenth Century (Forthcoming from Liverpool University Press, 2025).

Co-editor (with Michael Chemers), Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens, and Space Commandos: The Lost Worlds of Women Comic Artists (Monster Comics from the Gunderson Collection). UCSC Center for Monster Studies, 2023 (an exhibition catalogue accompanying the 2023-4 exhibition of the same title at the Santa Cruz MAH)

Co-editor (with Mike Cronin and Brian O’Conchubhair), The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies (Routledge, 2021)

Co-Editor and Contributor (with Greg Londe), The Cracked Lookingglass: Highlights from the Leonard L. Milberg Collection of Irish Prose (Princeton University Library, 2011). More Info

Peer-Reviewed Essays and Articles:

“Undisciplining Dracula: Fledgling and Afrofuturism.” Undisciplining the Victorian Classroom, 2024.

“Gothic Realism, or Reading is Believing in Dracula.” Irish University Review 53.1 (Spring 2023), pp. 9-26.

“Reading Outside the Lines: Imagining New Histories of Irish Fiction.” The Routledge International Handbook of Irish Studies.  Ed. Renée Fox, Mike Cronin, and Brian O’Conchubhair (Routledge, 2021), pp. 275-189. 

“Ireland’s Realist Forms: Queering the Fog in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Emily Lawless’s Grania.” Victorian Studies 61.4 (Summer 2019), pp. 559-581.

“Fleshing Dry Bones: Standish O’Grady’s Sensory Revivalism.” Standish O’Grady’s Cuculain.  Ed. Gregory Castle and Patrick Bixby (Syracuse University Press, 2016), pp. 191-209.

“A Disconcerting Pact With Gravity: Nineteenth-Century Acrobats and the Failure of Transcendence.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 38.2 (May 2016), pp. 79-92.

“Building Castles in the Air: Female Intimacy and Generative Queerness in Dracula.”  Dracula: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, Second Edition, by Bram Stoker. Ed. John Paul Riquelme (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015), pp. 590-607.

 “The Revivalist Museum: W.B. Yeats and the Reanimating of History.” Yeats and Afterwords.  Ed. Marjorie Howes and Joseph Valente (University of Notre Dame Press, 2014), pp. 15-41.

“Carmilla and the Politics of Indistinguishability.”  J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla. Ed. Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (Syracuse University Press, 2013), pp. 110-121.

“Robert Browning’s Necropoetics.” Victorian Poetry 49.4 (Winter 2011), pp. 463-483.

 “Michael Longley’s Early Epitaphs.” New Hibernia Review 13.2 (Summer 2009), pp. 125-140. (Reprinted in Poetry Criticism, vol. 118, 2011).

Selected Short Pieces and Reviews

Review of The Child Sex Scandal in Modern Irish Literature: Writing the Unspeakable, by Joseph Valente and Margot Backus. Irish Literary Supplement (Fall 2021)

Review of Worlds Enough: The Invention of Realism in the Victorian Novel, by Elaine Freedgood. Review 19 (January 2021) 

“Even Supposing: Bleak House and Pandemic Intimacies.” Foundry (November 2020). 

Review of Novel Institutions: Anachronism, Irish Novels, and Nineteenth-Century Realism, by Mary Mullen. Studies in the Novel 52.3 (Fall 2020), pp. 358-360. 

“Dramatic Monologues: A Teaching Exercise.” Pocket Instructor: Literature. Eds. Diana Fuss and William Gleason (Princeton University Press, 2015).

Review of Museum Trouble: Edwardian Fiction and the Emergence of Modernism by Ruth Hoberman. Victorian Studies 55.4 (Summer 2013), pp. 760-2.

Selected Exhibitions

Co-Curator (with Michael Chemers), Werewolf Hunters, Jungle Queens, and Space Commandos: The Lost Worlds of Women Comic Artists, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 10/23-3/24

Co-Curator, The Cracked Looking Glass: Celebrating the Leonard Milberg Collection of Irish Prose, Princeton University Library, 2/11-7/11, Princeton, NJ