Education and Awards
- Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia, August 2010
- B.A., English Language and Literature, magna cum laude, The George Washington University, 2004
Dissertation
Committee: Stephen Railton (director), Jerome McGann, Victoria Olwell, Heather Warren
In my dissertation, “That Great Burning Day”: Apocalyptic in Antebellum Literature and Culture, I investigate the intersections of apocalyptic rhetoric and symbolism in literary and popular fiction (Stowe, Hawthorne, Cooper, Thoreau, Melville, Poe, and Lippard), theological texts, sermons, and religious newspapers before the Civil War. Most literary studies of antebellum American apocalyptic have neglected its immediate historical and cultural roots in nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology, while most studies of nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology have neglected the imaginative engagement of period writers with the apocalyptic. I attempt to amend both oversights, using the prominence of the apocalyptic across period genres, authors, and ideologies to think about how scholars understand and constitute boundaries between sacred and secular texts—boundaries that are unclear in nineteenth-century works. I argue that apocalyptic rhetoric and symbolism bleed in, among, and between nearly all aspects of antebellum written culture, and that antebellum authors and preachers interpreted emerging secular dogmas such as nationalism, reform, technology, and progress through apocalyptic “signs of the times.”
Awards
- Thomas J. Griffis Prize for the Best Essay by a Student Beyond the First Year of Graduate Work in English, for “‘Taken Possession of’: Hawthorne’s ‘Celestial Railroad’ in the Nineteenth-Century Evangelical Canon, 2010.
- SHANTI Exploratory Cohort Fellowship, for technical training, initial design, and help implementing a digital edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” (forthcoming at celestialrailroad.org), 2009-10.
- Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities Summer Research Grant, for startup research work for celestialrailroad.org, Summer 2009
- Tane Travel Scholarship, for travel to the Bicentennial Poe Conference in October 2009
