Welcome
Welcome and thank you for visiting my website! I hold a PhD in English and have several years experience teaching composition, critical thinking and analysis, and literature. My research centers around questions of cultural identity through literature, keeping in mind how authors use their creations to reflect their own ideas about their nation, the time in which they live or set their works, and how they may or may not be using their works to influence or change the larger national identity. This historical and cultural approach is particularly useful because it allows me to study literary productions and intersect organically with other academic fields such as gender studies, history, and popular culture. My dissertation, "Revolution and Improvement in the Writings of Jane Austen and Margaret Fuller," completed at Claremont Graduate University under the direction of Robert Hudspeth, follows this approach and explores the ways women in early nineteenth-century England and America discussed and understood their opportunities for personal improvement, and their impact on their communities. My courses also incorporate this methodology, regularly blending history, popular culture, and literature, even in writing courses, as we explore how artists, authors, and cinematographers convey their stories in their various media.
My current research projects include a monograph investigating how Margaret Fuller's work promoting women's education and greater public role in nineteenth-century America evolved, particularly in light of her years in Italy during the Revolution of 1848. Another project involves tracing Jane Austen's critical reception in nineteenth-century United States, assessing how critics responded to Austen's works, and then promoted them to their readers either in reviews of her work, or in reviews of American novelists. I am also working on a collaborative project exploring enacted gender roles in Japanese animation, a study that offers an interesting opportunity to examine how a global, popular culture medium attempts to convey Japanese cultural ideas while also engaging an international audience.
At present, I am working as a writing tutor, and freelance editor and writing consultant. For more information about any of these service, please see my contact page linked above.
Feel free to look around the site. From the menu above, you'll find links to my CV, my blog, sample syllabi, and some of the resources I recommend to students.
Should you have any questions, feel free to email me or leave me a comment on my blog.
Thanks for stopping by!
Sandra