I am delighted to be joining the English Department at Stetson University this fall where I will teach courses in nineteenth-century literature, the novel, and literature and medicine. All these courses explore the relationships among literature, science, and race in the context of British globalism. I am completing a book manuscript, Morbid Cravings, which I plan to submit to publishers in Spring 2022. Morbid Cravings works at the intersection of the medical humanities and gender and sexuality studies to show how gendered representations of appetite in nineteenth-century literature inform the medical discourse about “eating disorders” by the century’s end. At the same time, these disorders paradoxically encode political and imperial anxieties about the meaning of daily consumption for a nation fed by the world.  

In my classes, I model the interdisciplinary ethos of my scholarship, in which the rhetoric of scientific knowledge can be put into productive relationships with literary texts to foster a critical social conscience about various issues in historical and contemporary life. Drawing from fields such as the medical humanities, environmental humanities, and sexuality studies, my courses, from first-year writing to advanced literary study, use writing intensive, interdisciplinary methods and digital humanities projects to engage students and help them build skills that will serve them in the university and beyond.