Dissertation:
My project entitled Sentimental Literacies: Grief, Writing, and American Indigenous Rights 1820-1905, looks at the relationship between literacy and sovereign rights to land in nineteenth-century America. I examine texts by James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Sedgwick, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Apess, Zitkala-Ša and others in addition to English-only pedagogical strategies from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.  I argue that cultural meanings of literacy were one of the primary modes through which Native and European Americans negotiated land rights and that literacy as a tool of settler colonialism requires further theorization in order to combat the persistence of assimilationist writing pedagogies at all levels of American education.

Publications:

"A Flight From Home: Negotiations of Gender and Nationality in Frances Osgood´s Early Career." Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain.  Ed. Brigitte Bailey, Lucinda Damon-Bach, and Beth Lueck.  University Press of New England, 2012.

Fellowships and Awards:

Isaiah Thomas Stipend awarded by the American Antiquarian Society to attend the 2013 Summer Seminar in History of the Book, "Indigenous Cultures of Print in Early America."

UC Davis Mellon Initiative in the Environmental Humanities Summer Research Award, 2013.

Honorable Mention, Legacy's SSAWW 2012 Best Paper Contest, Graduate Student Category

Davis Humanities Institute Dissertation Year Fellowship, 2012-2013

UC Davis Consortium for Women and Research Graduate Research Award, 2012

UC Davis Graduate Studies Travel Award, 2012

Summer Dissertation Fellowship UC Davis English Department, 2012 and 2013

Hemispheric Institute of the Americas- Tinker Foundation Summer Research Fellowship, 2011

Graduate Writing Fellow for the University Writing Program, 2010-2012

Phi Beta Kappa, 2007

Teaching Experience: 

Instructor for the English Department: ENL 3: Introduction to Literature

Instructor for the University Writing Program: UWP 1: Expository Writing, UWP 101: Advanced Composition

Teaching Assistant: Rhetoric and Tolerance in American Society, 19th-Century American Literature to the Civil War, Introduction to Principles of Criticism, Narrative Form and "Natural" Feelings

Presentations:

"Lydia Sigourney and the Anti-Removal Rhetoric of Sentiment." CCCC, Las Vegas.  March 13-16, 2013.  NCTE. 

"Sisterhood in Pictographs: Interpreting Indigenous Literacy Practices in Hope Leslie."  Citizenship and Belonging, Denver. October 11-13, 2012.  Society for the Study of American Women Writers.

"Social Geographies and New Mestiza Rhetorics: Approaching Ethnic Identities in the Classroom."  CCCC, St. Louis. March 21-24, 2012.  National Council of Teachers of English.

"Teaching the Crisis: Critical Pedagogy in the UC System and Beyond."  CCCC, Atlanta. April 6-9, 2011.  NCTE.

"Black, White, and Yellow Fever: Race and Embodiment in The Mysteries of New Orleans."  Everybody Loves You When You're Down and South, New Orleans. April 8-11, 2010, Society for the Study of Southern Literature.

"A Flight from Home Frances Osgood's Early Career Abroad."  Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers in Great Britain, Ireland, and Europe, Oxford, England. July 16-20, 2008.  The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society.