Department of English (MSN 3E4)
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444
(703) 993-1193
Positions Held
Assistant Professor, English, George Mason University, Fall 2008-
Director of Mason Topics and Term Assistant Professor, George Mason University, Fall 1998 - Spring 2008
Term Assistant Professor, George Mason University, Fall 1995 - Spring 2008
Term Assistant Professor, Wake Forest University, Fall 1993 - Spring 1995
Education
Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University, English Literature, January, 1996. Dissertation: "Romantic Fictions of Personality and Property: Edgeworth, Austen, and Wordsworth," directed by Frances Ferguson and Mary Poovey
Scholarly Activities
In Print
"'Like a Spoiled Actress Off the Stage': Anti-Theatricality, Nature, and the Novel." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Volume 39 (2010).
"'Experiments Before Breakfast': Toys, Education, and Middle-Class Childhood." Nineteenth-Century Childhood and the Rise of Consumer Culture. Ed. Dennis Denisoff. Ashgate Press, 2008.
"'Sweet Gardening Labour': Merit and Hierarchy in Paradise Lost," Exemplaria 7 (1995): 499-518.
"Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth," Nineteenth-Century Literature 49 (1994): 1-20.
"'That Sole and Despotic Dominion': Slaves, Wives, and Game in Blackstone's Commentaries," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1993-94): 195-217.
Review of Children's Literature: A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter by Seth Lerer. XVIII New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century.
Review of Isolated Cases: The Anxieties of Autonomy in Enlightenment Philosophy and Romantic Literature by Nancy Yousef. Modern Philology 104 (2006): 138-141.
Forthcoming
“The Cult of Adulthood; or, ‘The Time of Real Amusement.’” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction.
Rev. of Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment by William McCarthy. New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century.
Provisionally Accepted for Publication
“For Adult Audiences: Age and the Novel from Defoe to James” (new)
Conference Papers
"Dating Pamela: Mr. B, Goody-Two Shoes, and the Age of Consent," Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Cultures Workshop at the University of Chicago, April 2010.
"'For the Youth of Both Sexes': Re-Writing Pamela," American Society for Eighteenth- Century Studies, March, 2010.
"Little Books and Children Six Feet High: Differentiating Readers," American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March, 2009.
“Childhood’s Edge and Imperial Policy,” 18th and 19th Century British Women Writers Conference, March 2008.
“’Like a Spoiled Actress off the Stage’: Theatre and the Novel in the 18th Century,” Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, February, 2008.
“”Experiments Before Breakfast’: Edgeworth Codifies a Middle-Class Ideal,” Nineteenth-Century Studies Association, March 2005.
"Moral Life in Jane Austen: Or, Why Fine Dancing, Like Virtue, Must be its Own Reward," The Intellectual Life of the Schools Project, August 1996
"Protecting the 'Timid Line': Wordsworth and Copyright," Washington Area Romanticists Group, April 1995
"Maria Edgeworth and the 'Charm of Probability,'" MLA 1994
"Commerce and Character in Maria Edgeworth," Johns Hopkins University Journal Club, September 1992
"Consuming Northanger Abbey," Johns Hopkins Woman's Studies Workshop, November 1992
Teaching Experience
Spring 2010:
ENGL 640: Nineteenth-Century British Literature
ENGL 526: Special Topics in the History and Criticism of Children’s Literature (Amelia Rutledge and I proposed this course)
Fall 2009:
ENGL 453: British Novel of the Nineteenth Century
ENGL 460: Critical Study of Children’s Literature (Amelia Rutledge and I proposed this course)
Fall 2008:
ENGL 101: Composition
ENGL 101: Composition (linked to CONF 101: Conflict and Our World)
Fall 1993-Spring 2008:
Children’s Literature (undergraduate and graduate-level)
Nineteenth-Century British Literature (undergraduate and graduate-level)
Linked Composition
Shakespeare's Tragedies and Romances; Histories and Comedies
Romantic Authorship: Wordsworth and Coleridge
Literature and Society: Revolution and Reform; Romantic Feeling and Gothic Horror,
Romanticism and Revolution
English Poetry of the Romantic Period
Thesis Committees
Director of a thesis committee for a Masters thesis on Charles Dickens’s use of the marriage plot, Fall 2010
Served on a thesis committee for a Masters thesis on gender in children’s fiction of the British Empire, Fall 2007
Independent Study in The Nineteenth-Century Novel (graduate-level), Spring 2006
Service
Fall 2008-Spring 2010:
Faculty Committee
Fall 2008-Spring 2009:
Ad-Hoc Committee on Term Faculty Rating and Rubric