1.     How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
I started out as a performer, mostly in Shakespeare. I went to an all-women's college (Bryn Mawr), and then helped to found an all-female theatre group (Uncut Pages...get it?), so I spent a lot of time thinking about (and experiencing) the ways that bodies, gender, and texts work together to create meaning. While I took an eighteenth-century satire class with the lovely Peter Briggs, I didn't really encounter eighteenth-century theatre until much later.
 During the early days of my PhD work in Theatre, I read an article by Ellen Donkin about Sarah Siddons in which she mentioned that Siddons was pregnant during a performance, and it opened up a whole new aspect of this initial area of interest for me. So I found the eighteenth century through that--through this moment in time where women's reproductive bodies were (even if not universally and not without difficulty) accepted in the context of their professional careers in ways that often seem, sadly, remarkable to us today.
2.     What are you working on right now?
A book manuscript about celebrity pregnancy on the eighteenth-century London stage. I consider how the bodies were accommodated within a repertory company from a managerial perspective, how pregnancy intersected with a woman's established celebrity persona and the fictional characters she performed, and how these publicly pregnant bodies may offer us a new ways of thinking about some of the larger cultural movements and ideas we ascribe to the eighteenth century, such as sensibility, the rise of obstetrics as a distinct medical practice, ideas of nature and natural motherhood, etc.
3.     How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work? 
It's probably pretty self-evident from the answer above---it's everything I do! I'm fortunate in my work to be able to build on the incredible foundations that other scholars have laid in the area of women's studies, in the eighteenth century and beyond--I'm going to resist the urge to start listing people as it would take up the remaining space in this posting. 
4.     What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
 I  have to give a shout-out to Anne Helen Petersen's recent article for Buzzfeed about Kim Kardashian's first pregnancy--it hits on a lot of the questions and concerns I look at in a historical context, and spurs me on to deeper considerations of the ways celebrity bodies might have mattered to audiences then.  
I'm also returning to my Shakespeare roots this semester to teach a graduate performance class, so I've been reading Giles Block's Speaking the Speech. I love how invested he is in the smallest details of the way Shakespeare's text communicates with a performer, and how the performer then brings it to life. Beyond being a good book about Shakespeare, there's something deeply poignant right now about thinking through how and why the way we communicate matters so deeply. 
5.     What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
Encourage conversation and transparency around the issues we all struggle with, and make sure those conversations intersectional. Discrimination, equitable hiring practices, pay gaps, reproductive health, emotional labor--the only way these systemic problems get any better is if we talk about them, compare experiences, compare solutions, and commit to doing a better job in the future. I also think we've got to be able to have them in person and not just over social media. 
I love what a supportive community ASECS is, particularly the Women's Caucus. Continuing and furthering our commitment to accessibility for students, adjuncts, and other non-tenured and non-tenure-track members is the kind of work that benefits us all by enriching our community.  ​

1. How did you become interested in eighteenth-century studies in particular?
My earliest interest in eighteenth-century studies was in fashion: when I was sixteen, I spent a summer sewing myself an eighteenth-century gown. Two years later, at Kenyon College, I had the pleasure of taking classes with Dr. Jim Carson, who introduced me to eighteenth-century fiction and later became my honors thesis advisor. I immediately became hooked by the uncanniness of eighteenth-century fictions. I was fascinated with how eighteenth-century literature was simultaneously familiarly modern and utterly strange. In particular, I loved the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century literature, the way it blended sex with sentiment, pleasure with didacticism, and “formal realism” with absurd plotting.
2. What are you working on right now?
I’m currently working on my dissertation, Touchy Subjects: An Eighteenth-Century Anatomy of Haptic Sensation. My dissertation recuperates the complexity of the sense of touch—and by extension, the other senses—in eighteenth-century British literature and culture. Organized around four forms of touching (nerves, skin, hands, and invisible hands), Touchy Subjects sutures together the experience of embodiment and the narrative and epistemological structures of the period.
3. How do you approach or incorporate gender or women's studies in your work?
Even when gender is not the primary subject of my work, I would describe my research as broadly informed by feminist scholarship, especially Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling. At the moment, gender and women studies are at the forefront of my work: I am currently writing the third chapter of my dissertation, “Hands,” which focuses on the fetishization of women’s gloves and hands in eighteenth-century Britain. In “Hands,” I bring together material culture and literary representations to demonstrate a shift in the meaning of gloves: traditionally, gloves connoted elite social status and authority, but, in the eighteenth century, gloves come to primarily signify femininity. In my chapter, I argue that this process was accomplished through pervasive eroticized representations of women’s gloving practices, and that the associated rise of the gloved populace during the period can be understood as a material manifestation of a changing cultural attitude toward the sense of touch.
4. What is one book or article that you are reading now that gets your creative and/or analytic side going? Why? (eighteenth-century studies, scholarship, anything)
As a part of my current research on women’s gloving practices, I recently revisited Norbert Elias’ The History of Manners (the first volume of The Civilizing Process). Rereading Elias, I was impressed by both his analysis of early modern habitus, as well as his ability to draw links between emotional experience, embodied practices, and large-scale political changes. When I feel stuck, I’ve always found reading something out of discipline or field can help provide a new perspective or framework for whatever topic I’m working on. The History of Manners helped me to rethink the evidence, structure, and stakes of my argument.
5. What more can we do to support women in academia? In ASECS?
​I think it’s great that the Women’s Caucus decided to restart its mentoring program last year, and I would love to see that program expanded to encompass ASECS affiliate conferences. Regional conferences are often the first conference experience that graduate students have and, as such, it’s a crucial time to welcome and engage with women as they enter the next stage in their professionalization. I think it’s important to provide women, especially newcomers to the profession, with both formal and informal opportunities to meet other women in the field.