I recently met up with a current student, Ana, and a former student, Melanie, for a discussion about the English major and the doors it can open. Listen to our recorded conversation on the Co-Designed podcast here.

I was recently asked to join my colleagues Vince and Dave as a guest for an episode of their podcast, A Dark Impression. In this episode Vince and Dave discuss hauntings and specifically the films The Changeling (1980) and The Haunting of Hill House (2018). I join the conversation partway through the episode to talk … Continue reading Hauntings

Check out my piece about Barnaby Rudge and true crime podcasts over on CrimeReads!  In "How Charles Dickens Presaged the Rise of True Crime Podcasts," I write about Dickens's fifth novel and its connection to fact, fiction, and crime.  The way the novel blends these together is a precursor, I suggest, to the narrative styles honed by modern-day true … Continue reading Charles Dickens and Podcasts

My book, Victorian Negatives: Literary Culture and the Dark Side of Photography in the Nineteenth Century, was published by SUNY Press in July of 2019. Victorian Negatives examines the intersection between Victorian photography and literary culture, and argues that the development of the photographic negative played an instrumental role in their confluence. The negative is a technology … Continue reading Victorian Negatives

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here.  I am grateful to the editors for permission to re-publish it on this blog. I should begin this post with a confession: I am a hypochondriac. When faced with even the most innocuous medical anomaly, my mind goes to the worst-case scenario. … Continue reading Really Sick in Bleak House

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it on this blog.   The Wessex of Thomas Hardy, 1902 “The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very … Continue reading Literary Places: A Review of Placing Literature

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it on this blog. In the fall of 2012, I taught a version of my department’s Major Author Studies course on Charles Dickens.  As this was my second time teaching a … Continue reading The Reading Project

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it here. Recently I’ve been contemplating motherhood as it is represented in Victorian hidden mother portraits and Victorian breastfeeding portraits, two fascinating photographic trends. A little over a year ago, I … Continue reading Images of Victorian Motherhood, Effaced and Exposed

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it here. Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often.  “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I … Continue reading Celebrity Circulation II: Dickens’s Moving/Images

This post was first published in the Journal of Victorian Culture Online here. I am very grateful to the Editors for permission to re-publish it here. Charles Dickens, 1858 George Watkins Photograph As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide.  The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], … Continue reading Celebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs