Contact Information
608 S Wright St.
MC 204
Urbana, IL 61801
Office Hours
Research Areas
Biography
I am a printer-scholar and PhD Candidate studying nineteenth-century American literature, book history, and transgender studies. I am also an award-winning printer and book artist producing work under my imprint, Meanwhile...Letterpress. In 2022 I assisted Professor Ryan Cordell (iSchool and English) with the founding of Skeuomorph Press & Book Lab, and served as its founding Assistant Director from 2022 until 2025. Since 2024 I have been involved in organizing Queer Bibliography, an annual international conference. In my free time I restore nineteenth-century printing presses.
Research Interests
- Bibliography, Book History, and Print Culture
- Transgender and Queer Studies
- Nineteenth Century American Literature
Research Description
My dissertation applies a transgender lens to books as everyday objects that impact trans life by investigating how the book’s materiality—from the binding to typography—helped construct the boundaries that define normative and nonnormative gender in nineteenth-century America. I also work on "critical fabrication" and research-creation as research methodologies, as well as histories and theories of descriptive bibliography and scholarly editing.
Education
MA English Literature, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018
MA Gender & Women's Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2016
BFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2001
Grants
2024-2026 Junior Fellow, Andrew M. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography
2024-2025 Newberry Library Short Term Fellowship
2024 Harry H. Harkins T’73 Travel Grant for LGBT History, Rubenstein Library, Duke University
2023-2024 English Department Fellowship
2023 Philip Zwicker Memorial Research Grant, Cornell University
2023 LAS and English Department Summer Research Fellowship
2023 Graduate College Dissertation Research Travel Grant
2023 California Rare Book School Scholarship
2022-2023 Graduate Student Fellow, Humanities Research Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2022-2023 William Reese Company Fellow in American Bibliography, Library Company of Philadelphia
2022-2023 Katharine F. Pantzer Jr. Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography, Houghton Library, Harvard University
2021 Smalley Fellowship, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Summer Research)
2021 California Rare Book School Scholarship
2021 Sambrook Award, London Rare Book School
2019 President's Diversity in Research Travel Award, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2019 Caxton Club Scholarship, Rare Book School, University of Virginia
2016-2017 Kirkpatrick Fellowship, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Awards and Honors
2024 American Printing History Association Individual Laureate Award
2024 Outstanding Teaching Assistant, Department of Gender & Women's Studies
2020 College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Award for Excellence in Teaching
2020 Tulane University Purchase Price, College Book Arts Association Members' Juried Exhibition
2020 College Book Arts Association Student Member Prize, CBAA Members' Juried Exhibition
2019 English Department Undergraduate Teaching Award
Courses Taught
As Instructor of Record:
- ENG 121: Introduction to Comics [in Theory and Practice]
- ENG 250: Nineteenth Century American Fiction [Bodies, Books, Genders, and Genres]
- ENG 325: Topics in LGBT Literature and Film [Transgender Literature and Cultural Production]
- GWS 370: Queer Theory
- RHET 105: Research and Writing
- BTW 250: Principles of Business Communication
As Teaching Assistant:
- ENG 255: Early American Literature and Culture
- GWS 202: Sexualities
- GWS 275: Politics of Fashion
Additional Campus Affiliations
Graduate Employees' Organization IFT/AFT Local 6300
Gender & Women's Studies (Queer Studies Minor)
Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory
Skeuomorph Press and BookLab
Highlighted Publications
JOURNAL ARTICLES
- "Making Mary Ann Waters is a free Black woman: Critical Fabrication as Bibliographic Method," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts, vol.64, no. 3 (2022): 559-569. (Special issue: New Approaches to Critical Bibliography and Material Texts, edited by Kate Ozment and Lisa Maruca)
- "'Calling [herself] Eleanor': Gender Labor and Becoming a Woman in the Rykener Case." Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 55, no. 1 (2019) : 249-266.
- "'You deciphered me and now I am hard to read': How the Body is a Book." Library Trends 64.4 (2016): 741-755.
BOOK CONTRIBUTIONS
- with Brandi K. Adams (ASU) "Toward a Trans* Bibliography in Early Modern English Drama: A Provocation," Early Modern Trans Drama, edited by Simone Chess and Sawyer Kemp. Forthcoming from ACMRS Press, summer 2026.
ENCYCLOPEDIA ENTRIES
- "Cis, or Cisgender." Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2019.