Dissertation
My dissertation, “Intimate Reading: Femininity, Sexuality, and Literary Subcultures of Britain and France,” argues that literary texts produced sites of contact for emerging same-sex sexual cultures in the Victorian and Modernist periods. Complicating a critical emphasis on histories of sexological, psychoanalytic, and legal efforts to categorize, pathologize, and criminalize queer and trans people in this period, my project thus chronicles an alternative, parallel history of readerly and erotic intimacy. Drawing on an English archive of novels and poetry, diaries and correspondence, early drafts and editorial notes, essays and reviews, and artistic adaptions and scholarship, I examine literary practices (allusions, elisions, untranslated text, and excisions) used to index queer sexuality. I contend that certain feminine qualities, from levity to delight, ground this semiotics of same-sex sexuality across genders, thus turning the work of literary interpretation into an intimate act of community formation. In Villette, Charlotte Brontë uses untranslated French as a defamiliarizing cue for Anglophone readers to interpret feminine levity as a sign of homoerotic availability; Algernon Charles Swinburne’s turn to Sapphism to evoke transness influenced later Victorian writers like Michael Field and Vernon Lee; Virginia Woolf makes queer practices legible through the meaningfully eccentric silences of white British subjects; and the editorial omission of “delight” from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood explains an overlooked argument in the text for the pleasure of both lesbian cruising and feminine solidarity. While the bulk of my project focuses on English literature, I also turn to Marcel Proust, who was caught up in these cultural currents and who theorizes how a literary vocabulary of femininity can translate into a sexual subculture’s lingua franca. “Intimate Reading” intervenes at the nexus of literary and sexuality studies by illuminating textual practices that have enabled sexual and gender minorities to use the reading and writing of literature for the formation of community.
Peer-Reviewed Research
“Trans Sapphism,” Victorian Studies 66, no. 1 (Autumn 2023), forthcoming
Editorial Work
With Margaret Speer, I guest-edited the summer 2023 issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, “Writing Aslant: Voicing across Genders in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Find our introduction here.
From 2020–2021, I served as the editorial assistant at Representations, where I edited the virtual issue “Unfixing Gender Studies.” I continue to work as the journal’s proofreader.