Broadly speaking, I specialize in Modernist literature, Critical Theory, the Home Arts, and Design.  But specifically, I’m interested in the space created by the intersection of these topics.  For example, I have presented on Gertrude Stein and the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, and Walter Benjamin with Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiappelli.  In both presentations, I attended to the ways in which the language of design, be it a recipe or a dress, might be fruitfully compared to traditional prose and poetry.

My current project is on Mina Loy as flâneur, and the ways in which the discourses of consumption and design make their way into her poetics.

I teach a variety of classes here at Calvin College:

• Freshman Composition
• Writing in Digital Environments
• a survey of British literature from the Victorian to Post-WWII periods
• Introduction to Critical Theory
• Comics and the Graphic Novel
• an upper-division Modernism course
• Literature and Gender

Calvin College has a January term which allows me to teach specialize “theme” courses such as Women and Modernism of the 1920s, and Vampire Literature.