ABOUT ME
I teach American literature at the University of Tampa, where I am also the Director of the Honors Program. I received my BA and MA in English from Baylor University and my PhD in English from the University of Mississippi. My first book is titled Stripped and Script: Loyalist Women Writers of the American Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2019). That book is about my work on letters and journals of the late 18th century and how women used letters to gain access to public, political spaces when they were otherwise denied the ability to do so.
My second area of expertise is sentimental fiction and its origins — what today we would call romance novels. Today, I am working on a book called Reading Romantasy: The Evolution of Smut to Spice, which is an in-depth study defining Romantasy, identifying Romantasy readers, and providing historical and cultural context for Romantasy reading. My interest in the origins of sentimental fiction (early Romance novels) has been published in American Literature and is about the intersections of sentimental fiction, disease, and mis- and disinformation.
