Academic History

M.A., Ph.D., University of Rochester
B.A., Canisius College
At St. Thomas since 1989

Expertise/Specialties

18th- and 19th-Century British Literature
Film Studies

Selected Publications

Book:  
Masquerade and Gender: Disguise and Female Identity in Eighteenth-Century Fictions by Women. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Articles and reviews:

"Sexual and Textual Indeterminacy:  Eighteenth-Century English Representations of Sapphism.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15.3 (Sept. 2006):  408-31.

"Do We Remember?: The Catholic Church and the Holocaust," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 9.2 (Spring 2006): 68-106.

"Castaway and Cast Away: Colonial, Imperial, and Religious Discourses in Daniel Defoe and Robert Zemeckis," The Journal of Religion and Film, 9.1 (April 2005):  www.unomaha.edu/jrf.

Revew of Ann Cline Kelly's Jonathan Swift and Popular Culture: Myth, Media, and The Man  (Palgrave, 2002).  New Hibernia Review 7.3 (Autumn 2003): 148-50.

"Highlighting Women Writers at the End of the Eighteenth Century." Review of Eleanor Ty's Empowering the Feminine: The Narratives of Mary Robinson, Jane West, and Amelia Opie, 1796-1812 (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1998) and Amelia Opie's Adeline Mowbray, ed. Shelley King and John B. Pierce (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999). Eighteenth-Century Studies 35.4 (Summer 2002): 623-5.

"'Same Person...Just a Different Sex':  Sally Potter's Construction of Gender in Orlando." Woolf Studies Annual, Volume 7 (January 2001): 23-48.

Selected Presentations

“The Merchant of Venice as a Test Case for Eighteenth-Century Anti- and Philo-Semitic Sentiments,” American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2008.

"'Gratitude...[Shall] Bind You to Good Behavior':  Benevolence and Surveillance in the Writings of  Sarah Scott," American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2007.

Roundtable discussant for "Teaching the Transatlantic" (speaking about my graduate-level course, "The West  Indies in the Eighteenth-Century British Imagination"), American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2006.

"Castaway and Cast Away:  Colonial and Imperial Discourses in Daniel Defoe and Robert Zemeckis,"  American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, March 2005.

"The Director Who Didn't Make the Cut:  Alfred Hitchcock and the Vatican Film List," analysis of Notorious and Marnie, Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities, January 2005.

"'Compulsory Heterosexuality' and the Eighteenth Century," American Society for Eighteenth-Century  Studies, March 2004.

Awards & Honors

2004-2005 Aquinas Scholars Professor of the Year

Membership in Professional Associations

American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS)
Midwestern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (MWASECS), President 2006-07, Vice-President 2005-06
Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA)