Education

PhD, University of South Carolina
MFA, University of South Carolina
MA, Wake Forest University
BA, Wake Forest University

Areas of Specialization

20^th and 21^st Century American Literature
American Women Writers
Fat Studies
Creative Nonfiction Writing
Medical Humanities
Gender Studies

Courses Taught

SAEL 200: Social Advocacy and Ethical Life
ENGL 101: Critical Reading and Composition
ENGL 102: Rhetoric and Composition

Selected Awards

Bridge Humanities Postdoctoral Teaching Fellowship (2020-2023)
Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Dissertation Fellowship (2019-2020)
Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize (2018)
Breakthrough Graduate Scholar Award, University of South Carolina (2016)

Publications

   • “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Fat and Stigmatizing Rhetoric in Medical Records.” In Weight Bias in Health Education: Critical Perspectives for Pedagogy and Practice. Edited by Heather Brown and Nancy Ellis-Ordway. Routledge, 2021.
   • “‘I Ain’t You’: Fat and the Female Body in Flannery O’Connor.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1 (Spring 2020).
   • Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. Autumn House Press, 2019. *Winner of the 2018 Autumn House Press Full-Length Nonfiction Prize
   • “Equilibrium, or My Mother Would Have Felt the Same Way.” The Boiler Journal. January 1, 2016.

Presentations

   • Guest author in Federica Schoeman’s graduate class “‘Cherchez la femme!’: A Feminist (Hence Disruptive) Study of the Western Intellectual Canon” (ENGL 803) to speak about my book. University of South Carolina, April 17, 2023.
   • “‘Limited by Body Habitus’: Combatting Fat Stigma in the Medical Industry, the University, and Beyond.” South Carolina State University, September 18, 2020.
   • “The Medical Gaze, Trauma, and Heteroglossia in Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story.” Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues. Johns Hopkins University, November 15, 2019.
   • Excerpts from Limited by Body Habitus: An American Fat Story. American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Washington, D.C., April 19, 2019. Panel chair.
   • “A Summer of Spillage: My Father’s Gastric Bypass and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in Seattle, Washington, March 22, 2016. Panel chair.
   • “‘This thing that she had done to herself’; Female Mobility and Agency in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand.” MELUS (The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States) National Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, March 4, 2016.
   • “Refiguring Fat Bodies: The U.S. ‘Obesity Epidemic’ and Grosz’s Volatile Bodies.” American Culture Association/Popular Culture Association National Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2, 2015.
   • “‘I’m split in two’: The Psychosexual Consequences of the Holocaust for two young girls – Anne Frank and Milena Roth.” Women and the Holocaust: Cultural Productions and Interpretations – The 17^th Annual Comparative Literature Conference at University of South Carolina, March 2, 2015.
   • “‘That was them not us’; Adrienne Rich’s Post-9/11 Political Poetry and the Frames of War.” “I Live Here!: Negotiating Notions of Public and Private” Conference at North Carolina State University, February 23, 2013.
   • “Breaking the Frames in Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins.” Peace & Nuclear Non-Proliferation: A World of No Nukes?: An Interdisciplinary Conference at Guilford College, February 16, 2013.