PhD, English and Women's and Gender Studies
About
Dissertation: Unsettling Testimony: Readers' Responses to Controversial Narratives of Sexual Violence
My dissertation traces the reception of several contemporary narratives about sexual abuse that have prompted public controversy. I argue that humanistic approaches are essential to understanding sexual abuse: as coversations about sexual violence in legal, media, and social contexts have become increasingly entrenched, as as #MeToo faces a global backlash, I argue that literary scholars can offer new insights by emphasizing practices of reading that engage with the ambiguity and multiplicity that frequently shape survivor experiences.
Research Interests: Life narrative studies, 20th and 21st century literature, autotheory, representations of violence, reception theory, cultural studies, critical media studies, literary censorship, digital studies, trauma studies, young adult literature.
Publications:
“Ambivalence, Genre, and Narrative Activism: Learning from the Backlash to Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa.” Special issue on Lives, Selves, Media, and #MeToo, a/b: Autobiography Studies. 23 July 2025.
Reviews:
Review: Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing by Babs Boter, Marleen Rensen, and Giles Scott-Smith (eds.), European Journal of Life Writing, vol. 11, 2022, pp. R1-R4.
Review: Stories of the Self: Life Writing After the Book by Anna Poletti, Life Writing, 11 Feb. 2021.
Review: Witnessing Girlhood: Toward an Intersectional Tradition of Life Writing by Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall, Biography, vol. 43, no. 4, 2020, pp. 822-825.
