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Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

Literature
University of California, San Diego
2007

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Literatures in English
University of California, San Diego
2005

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

English with Honors; Asian American Studies Minor
Scripps College
2002

Undergraduate

• Introduction to Black LGBTQ+ Studies (Cross-Listed with Interdisciplinary Studies)
• First-Year Writing: Writing, Literacy & Discourse
• Sophomore Seminar I: Introduction to English Studies
• Sophomore Seminar II: Theories of Interpretation (Introduction to Literary Theory)
• British Foundations (Survey of British Literature, Medieval to Present Day)
• Travel Narratives in Literature and Games
• Jane Austen: Love, Money, Fame (Major Author Course)
• Texts, Technologies and Telling Tales (Digital Humanities and Narratology)
• British Romantic Sensibilities (Culture and Politics in the Anglophone Atlantic 1770-1830)
• Cornerstone: African Diaspora Ancient to Present Day

Graduate

• The Black Atlantic
• The Global 18th-Century
• Women’s Travel Narratives in the 19th-C Atlantic 
• Critical Methods
• Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (intro to era within a changing theoretical framework, e.g., Digital Humanities, Indigenous Studies)
• Race and Early Modern Drama (Spring 2023, only)

Selected Awards and Grants 

2021; American Council of Learned Societies (ACLA) Digital Extension Grant for Hidden Archives: Race, Gender, and Religion in UCSB’s Ballitore Collection, with Dr. Rachael Scarborough King (PI, U.C. Santa Barbara) and Dr. Danielle Spratt (California State University, Northridge) 

2020-2021, 2018-2019; UC-HBCU Initiative, partnered with Dr. Rachael Scarborough King (U.C. Santa Barbara)  

2020 Funding for "Empathy, Storytelling, and Film in Engineering”: Collaboration  with Virginia Tech University’s Bright C.S. (co-taught STEAM program for BIPOC middle school girls) and Arlington Public School District  

2015-2019 Reginald Lewis Endowment Travel Fund, Howard University 

2016-2017 Junior Faculty Writing and Creative Works Summer Academy. Howard University 

2016-2017 Junior Faculty Research Fund, English Department, Howard University 

2016 DGSI: Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative, Howard University  

2014-2015 Scholar Travel Grant, Modern Language Association 

2021; American Council of Learned Societies (ACLA) Digital Extension Grant

For Hidden Archives: Race, Gender, and Religion in UCSB’s Ballitore Collection, with Dr. Rachael Scarborough King (PI, U.C. Santa Barbara) and Dr. Danielle Spratt (California State University, Northridge) 

2020-2021, 2018-2019; UC-HBCU Initiative

Partnered with Dr. Rachael Scarborough King (U.C. Santa Barbara)

2020; Funding for "Empathy, Storytelling, and Film in Engineering”

Collaboration with Virginia Tech University’s Bright C.S. (co-taught STEAM program for BIPOC middle school girls) and Arlington Public School District 

2015-2019; Reginald Lewis Endowment Travel Fund, Howard University

2016-2017; Junior Faculty Writing and Creative Works Summer Academy. Howard University

2016-2017; Junior Faculty Research Fund, English Department, Howard University

2016; DGSI: Seshat: A Digital Humanities Initiative, Howard University

2014-2015; Scholar Travel Grant, Modern Language Association

The Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century

The Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century (Publisher book page; ebook available through an institutional subscription). Studies in Intellectual History.

This book challenges concepts of an ahistorically powerful England and shows both that the intermingling of Islamic and English Protestant identity was a recurring theme of the eighteenth century, and that this cultural mixing was a topic of debate and anxiety in the English cultural imagination. It charts the way representation of England and the Ottomans changed as England grew into an imperial power. By focusing on texts dealing with the Ottomans, the author argues that we can observe the turning point in public perceptions, the moments when English subjects began to believe British imperial power was a reality rather than an aspiration.

• Review. Smith, K. (2013). Journal of Religion in Europe, 6(3), 388-389.  
• Review. Murray, P. J. (2014). Journal of Early Modern History, 18(3), 302-304.  

Edited Works

Special Issue: Eighteenth-Century Camp ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830 9.1 (2019) 

In this special issue on “camp” and/in the long eighteenth century, we hold that this is not just a twentieth-century reference to an imagined past, but a concept that indeed does have its roots in eighteenth-century Europe. It is also a concept deeply rooted in constructions of gender and, whether implicitly or explicitly, a vital element in the lives of long eighteenth-century female artists, writers, and thinkers.

Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III – Images of the Harem in Literature and Theatre. A Commemoration of the Bicentenary of Lord Byron's Sojourn in the Ottoman Capital (1810)

While “Ottomania” deals with Ottoman–European cultural transfers and questions of Orientalism–Occidentalism in general, the latter focuses on theatre, music, arts and literature. The preceding volumes directed attention to musical interconnections and the works of composers such as Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791) or Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). The present volume points more toward poetry and literature by devoting this edition to two populartopics of the long eighteenth century. It expands a subject that earlier volumes had touched upon but not explored in depth, one of the most popular subjects of eighteenth-century theatre and literature: the seraglio and its harem.

Single-Author Book Chapters and Articles 

Chapter 6: Fantasies of Emancipation: Collaborations and Contestations in The History of Mary Prince in The Future of Feminist Eighteenth-Century Scholarship: Beyond Recovery  

There is an unfortunate argument being made that feminist scholarship of eighteenth-century literary studies has fulfilled its potential in academic circles. The Future of Eighteenth-Century Feminist Scholarship: Beyond Recovery shows us otherwise. Each of the essays in this volume reaffirms the feminist principles that form the foundation of this area, then builds upon them by acknowledging the inevitable conflicts they or their subjects have faced and the contradictions they or their subjects have lived.

In ACT 1: Playing the Sultana: Erotic Capital and Commerce in Defoe’s Roxana in Ottoman Empire and European Theatre Vol. III – Images of the Harem in Literature and Theatre. A Commemoration of the Bicentenary of Lord Byron's Sojourn in the Ottoman Capital (1810). 

In Roxana, the Fortunate Mistress (1724), attributed to Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), the heroine goes by many names over the course of her narrative, but only one of these is known to the readers: Roxana.1 Though earned late in the text, this appellation emerges as the identity that cannot be shed by its performer and the one that comes to define her as the character and a narrative.

In Part 2: Loving the Unstable Text and Times of Equiano’s Narrative: Using Carretta’s Biography in the Classroom in Teaching Olaudah Equiano's Narrative: Pedagogical Strategies and New Perspectives. (pp. 119-136)

In this collection of essays, most of them never before published, sixteen teacher-scholars focus explicitly on the various classroom contexts in which the Narrative can be assigned and various pedagogical strategies that can be used to help students understand the text and its complex cultural, intellectual, literary, and historical implications.