Research & Teaching Areas

  • 19C Literature
  • Periodical Studies
  • History of Science: Evolution
  • Visual Culture
  • Digital Humanities
  • Gender, Race & Class Identities
  • Adventure Fiction
  • TechComm

Professional Appointments

Affiliated Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology 2019-Present
Technical Editor, COVE 2018-2022
Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, Georgia Institute of Technology 2016-2018
Full-time Instructor, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth 2016
Instructor, Saint Anselm College 2012-15

Education

Ph.D. in Literary and Cultural Studies, Carnegie Mellon University 2016
MA in English and Comparative Literature, University of Cincinnati 2009
BA in English, University of Cincinnati, Magna Cum Laude 2007
BFA in Fine Art, University of Cincinnati, College of Design Art Architecture & Planning, Magna Cum Laude 2006

Monographs

Speculation and the Darwinian Method in British Romance Fictions, 1859-1914. Series in Victorian Studies. Athens: Ohio University Press, forthcoming 2024

Illustration in Fin-de-Siècle Transatlantic Romance Fiction. British Art: Histories and Interpretations since 1700 series. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Journal Articles

"Adventure Literature." Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature. Ed. Lisa Rodensky. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2023.

"Illustrating White Cannibals in Harper's Weekly: Adventure Fiction and Pictorial Journalism." American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism. 31.2 (2021): 134-154.

"Audio Guides for Digital Archives." Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 21.2 (2021): 144-146.

"Late-Nineteenth-Century Adventure Fiction and the Anthropocene." Configurations. 27.3 (2019): 271-300.

"Social Justice and Victorian Digital Humanities." Journal of Victorian Culture's Digital Forum. 24.3 (July 2019): 354-360.

"From Disclaimer to Critique: Race and the Digital Image Archivist." Digital Humanities Quarterly. 11.3 (2017).

"Egyptology and Darwinian Evolution in Conan Doyle and H. Rider Haggard: The Scientific Imagination." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 60.3 (June 2017): 314-340.

"Liberal Evolutionism and the Satirical Ape." Journal of Victorian Culture. 21.2 (2016): 1-21.

"The History and Reception of Charles Darwin's Hypothesis of Pangenesis." The Journal of the History of Biology. 47.4 (2014): 661-95.

"Beauty as a Terministic Screen in Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man." Victorian Network. 2.1 (Summer 2010): 49-69.

"Ethics and the Digital Archive: The Case for Visualizing H. Rider Haggard." Journal of Victorian Culture Online. Ed. Lisa Hager. Neo-Victorian Studies & Digital Humanities Week 2013. 21 October 2013.

Book Chapters

'Romance Fiction, Folk Tales, and Poetry: Amy Sawyer and the Arts and Crafts Movement" Nineteenth-Century Women Illustrators and Cartoonists. Ed. Jo Devereux. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming 2023).

"'An absurd parody of the Professor': Illustrating Professor Challenger." Re-examining Arthur Conan Doyle. Ed. Nils Clausson. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2021).

"Picturing Africa: Illustration in the Allan Quatermain Adventure Fictions of H. Rider Haggard." Imperial Middlebrow: Cross-colonial Encounters and Expressions of Power in Middlebrow Literature and Culture, 1890-1940. Eds. Christoph Ehland and Jana Gohrisch. (Leiden: Brill, 2020): 44-71.

"Science." Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction. Ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Jefferson: McFarland, 2018): 207-209.

"Liminality and Power in Bram Stoker's Jewel of Seven Stars." Critical Essays on Victorian Gothic and Sensation Fiction from Wollstonecraft to Stoker. Ed Dr. Marilyn Brock (Jefferson: McFarland, 2009): 132-43.

Special Issues Edited for Journal

"Illustration and Gender." Special Edition of Nineteenth‑Century Gender Studies. Eds. Kate Holterhoff and Nicole Lobdell. 11.2 (Summer 2015).

Public Writing

"Add Background Colors to SVGs Using the "rect" Element." CSS Tricks. 20 February 2020.

"How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Engineering Documentation." Nebo Blog. 21 June 2019.

"From Academic to Developer: Why Career Changes are No Longer Off Limits." Nebo Blog. 25 January 2019.

"Genius.com as an Alternative Social Media." ProfHacker: The Chronicle of Higher Education. 30 August 2018.

"Visualizing the Bicycle and the New Woman in 'The Lady's Realm.'" Medium. 31 May 2018.

"Visual Haggard: The Illustration Archive." Rider Haggard Society Journal. 126 (July 2018): 4-6.

"Using Digital Archives to Teach Data Set Creation and Visualization Design." ProfHacker: The Chronicle of Higher Education. 29 Sep. 2017.

"Report II: Poetry and Melancholia Conference." Society for the Social History of Medicine Gazette. 55 (December 2014): 6.

"Ethics and the Digital Archive: The Case for Visualizing H. Rider Haggard." Journal of Victorian Culture Online. Neo-Victorian Studies & Digital Humanities Week 2013. 21 Oct. 2013.

Books Edited

The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland by Eliza Lynn Linton [1885]. Eds. Deborah Meem and Kate Holterhoff. Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets, 2011.

Sowing the Wind by Eliza Lynn Linton [1867]. Eds. Deborah Meem and Kate Holterhoff. Brighton, UK: Victorian Secrets, 2014.

Books Reviewed

Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity from Darwin to the Anthropocene by David Sepkoski (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). Reviewed for Isis. 112.4 (December 2021): 848-849.

Reductive Reading: A Syntax of Victorian Moralizing by Sarah Allison (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2018). Reviewed for V21's Collations: Book Forum. 17 June 2019.

Haunting Modernity and the Gothic Presence in British Modernist Literature by Daniel Darvay (Switzerland: Palgrave, 2016). Reviewed for English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 62.1 (2019): 118-122.

Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children's Literature by Jessica Straley (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2016). Reviewed for Victorian Review. 43.2 (2018): 311-314.

"What Mary Shelley Can Teach STEM Readers." Review of Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of all Kinds by Mary Shelley (Cambridge: MIT, 2017). Reviewed for Science Fiction Studies. 45.2 (2018): 341-344.

Before Einstein: The Fourth Dimension in Fin de Siècle Literature and Culture by Elizabeth L. Throesch (New York: Anthem Press, 2017). Reviewed for English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 61.3 (2018): 396-399.

The Ploy of Instinct: Victorian Sciences of Nature and Sexuality in Liberal Governance by Kathleen Frederickson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014). Reviewed for the Journal of British Studies. 56.2 (2017): 424-25.

Education in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Exclusion as Innovation by Sheila Cordner (New York: Routledge, 2016). Reviewed for Impact. 6.1 (Winter 2017).

Digital Humanities Project

Visual Haggard: The Illustration Archive Director & Editor

I direct and edit Visual Haggard, a digital archive intended to preserve, centralize, and improve access to the illustrations from the novels published by H. Rider Haggard. Although the archive is currently offline (it is accessible using the Wayback Machine), this a literary and art historical resource aspires to make all Haggard illustrations readily available in a high-resolution and mobile device appropriate format. Currently, the site contains 1,900 images and receives approximately 1,500 page views every month. Visual Haggard is a federated archive with NINES, the Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship.

Courses Taught

Georgia Institute of Technology

CS 3311/ LMC 3432 Junior Design: Project Design and Technical Communication Strategies 2018
ENGL 1102 Victorian Digital Humanities 2018
ENGL 1102 Victorians in Cyberspace 2017
ENGL 1102 Visual Culture, Digital Archives and H. Rider Haggard 2017
ENGL 1102 The Literature of New Media 2016

University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth

ENL 684 Literary Studies and Theory 2016
ENL 200 Studies in Literature: Victorian Romance and Realism 2016
ENL 200 Studies in Literature: Fin de Siècle Adventure Fiction 2016

Saint Anselm College

EN 105 Freshman English 2014-15
HU 101, 102, 201, 202 Portraits of Human Greatness 2012-14

New Hampshire Institute of Art

AHT 399 Art and Identity 2015
AHT 201 Survey of Art History 2015

Carnegie Mellon University

ENG 213 Victorian Women Writers 2012
ENG 213 Victorian Detectives 2011
ENG 101 Interpretation and Argument: Achieving a Public Art 2010-11

University of Cincinnati

15 ENGL 102H Honors English Composition 2009
15 ENGL 101,102 English Composition 2007-08