Ph.D. in Literatures in English ( UCSD, focus on long nineteenth-century U.S. literature).

I focus on all things blood, especially the overlap of social, cultural, and medical interpretations of blood over time, bridging metaphorical and material, poetic and phenomenological, political and prosaic understandings of blood. I draw on fiction, poetry, medical sources, and visual arts in the thematic study of blood.

I examine blood because it exists in the overlap of social systems—above all religious, political, aesthetic, and scientific, especially medical ones—and thus adds breadth and depth to readings of canonical as well as neglected texts. Blood places all humans in a global, meaningful relation to novels, poems, serial texts, essays, medical literature, personal writing, and histories.

Aside from editing, writing, and researching, I am beginning work on the book project that follows my dissertation. I illustrate the basic change of the understanding of blood in nineteenth-century U.S. texts. I ask which blood seemed important, how it functioned as a political metaphor, how the Civil War influenced writing about blood, what role school education and hospitals played, how medical practitioners wrote about blood, what role it played in the rise of scientific racism, and conclude that the rise of Jim Crow racism and blood quanta is not an aberration, but a logical end point to these changes. My dissertation focused on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of The Seven Gables (1851), Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Die Geheimnisse von New Orleans (1853-5), Emily Dickinson’s “The name–of it–is ‘Autumn’,” Walt Whitman’s 1865 first edition of Drum-Taps, William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853) and his The Rising Son (1872), Edward H. Dixon’s medical journal The Scalpel and his The Terrible Mysteries of the Ku-Klux-Klan (1868), Samuel A. Cartwright’s “Report on the Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race” (1851), Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (1893-4), and Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood (1903).

Bio: see CV

Research Skills:
Microfilm, Microfiche, Electronic Resources, Bibliographies, Databases, Remote Resources, Composition of Annotated Bibliographies, Reception, History, Textual Criticism, Archival Work, Academic Presentations, Internet Research, Use of Literary Sources.

Teaching Skills:
Lecture, guided discussion, student presentations, group text analysis, structured group work, block seminars, Piazza course site, course blog.
Supervisors: Lisa Cartwright, Ph.D. , Nicole Tonkovich, Ph.D. , Michael Davidson, Ph.D., Shelley Streeby, Ph.D., and Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Ph.D.
Address: San Diego, CA