Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

English
King’s College London
2016

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Humanities
University of Chicago
2004

Bachelor of Arts (B.A.)

English
Mississippi State University
2003

Persuasive Writing and Research, Special Topics: “Writing Lives. Case Study: Eartha Kitt”

Persuasive Writing and Research, Special Topics: “Writing Lives. Case Study: Muhammad Ali”

Persuasive Writing and Research, Special Topics: “Black Fashion”

Persuasive Writing & Research, Special Topics: “Writing and Anger”

Introduction to Expository Writing and Literacy Studies

Writing as Exploration

Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented

Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented

The trade book arising from the creative component of my doctoral dissertation, this work of creative nonfiction blends cultural, historical, literary, media, and biographical analysis to examine the period in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s life after John Kennedy’s murder in 1963 through the death of Aristotle Onassis in 1975

A “very politically correct, wholesome family show”

A “very politically correct, wholesome family show”: Jane Seymour’s white, heterosexual femininity in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

In January 1993, the US television station CBS premiered a new TV drama about Michaela Quinn—a Boston doctor who moved alone to the Colorado frontier to establish her medical practice. Seymour's biography played a critical role in the initial promotion of the show. The character of Dr. Quinn, as Seymour played her, was a feminist in the Hillary Rodham Clinton vein, and the show's drama primarily revolved around Quinn's gender deviance and issues arising from white patriarchy. Given this progressive, feminist bent, it's surprising that the show resonated with conservative audiences and, in U.S. syndication, found a home on evangelical Christian networks such as PAX-TV and INSP. Combining media analysis, cultural analysis, and biographical research, this article analyzes how Jane Seymour's star image and biography enabled Dr. Quinn to interrogate and challenge gender roles while also working to bolster the show's position as “family values” TV. Ultimately, this analysis reveals the powerful role a star's biography can play in disseminating ideas to diverse, sometimes potentially resistant, audiences.

"Bad" Biography Exposed!

"Bad" Biography Exposed!: A Critical Analysis of American Super-Pop

Biography has long played an important role within American life, and yet mass-market biographies remain underexamined. Theorizing so-called "popular biography" within twentieth-century American popular nonfiction and celebrity journalism, this article analyzes the genre's conventions and its centrality to celebrity discourse.

Onassis, Elders, Obama

Onassis, Elders, Obama: dignity, arrogance and anger in discourses of modern (white) American femininity

Upon her death in 1994, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was repeatedly lauded for her ‘grace, dignity, style, class’, and this has remained the dominant discourse surrounding her public image in the years since. This article will historicize this dignity discourse in its contemporary political context, establishing the cultural contingency of the posthumous biographical accounts and revealing how the intimate public that “Jackie’s” narrative comprises has historically been embedded in, shaped by and reinforced ideologies of race and racialized American femininity. Analysis of the intersection of Onassis’s biographical narrative with those of Joycelyn Elders (Surgeon General of the United States, 1993–1994) and Michelle Obama (First Lady of the United States, 2009–2017) illuminates the ways in which Onassis’s image and the traditional femininity it has come to represent have been used to denigrate and reprimand Black women in the public sphere.

‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn

‘Watergate-ing’ Norman Mailer’s Marilyn: Life Writing in Cultural Context

In 1973, Norman Mailer published a work of creative nonfiction about the life of the actor Marilyn Monroe, entitled Marilyn: A Biography. Released amid a wave of American nostalgia for the 1950s and during the Watergate investigation, the book was upheld as evidence of a ‘witch-hunt’ Watergate culture. In this article, I will analyse the initial reception of Marilyn and its affective history. Situating Marilyn at the intersections of biography, New Journalism, and Watergate discourses demonstrates the important role historical context can play in analysis of celebrity biography. Considering Marilyn in its political, cultural, and literary context illuminates the ways in which the project’s destabilisation of truth aligned with New Journalist pursuits while clashing with Watergate era longings for stability, a collision which excited the ire of many of its initial critics and an early reception that continues to shape responses to the work to this day.