I’m an associate professor of English at Penn State York, where I’ve been teaching since 2003.  We’re a small campus, so I get to know lots of students by teaching a variety of writing and literature classes, including first-year composition and rhetoric, introductory literature classes in the short story and women’s fiction, and upper-level courses in literary theory, Caribbean literature, twentieth-century British literature, and women’s literature.

I am also currently the adviser and the program coordinator for the English program at Penn State York.

My current research project is called “Rum Histories,” a study of rum as a symbol in novels from the Caribbean Basin, the U.S., the U. K. and Canada.  In 2005, I published a book called Narrative Settlements:  Geographies of British Women’s Fiction between the Wars, in which I studied how women writers in Great Britain used iconic locations to investigate the changing role of women in England and the ways that change might reshape England’s territorial sovereignty.  I’ve also published on African and African-American fiction, detective fiction and I am working on an article on James Cameron’s recent film Avatar.

When I’m not in the office, you can find me running or biking the rail trail, on the tennis courts . . . or reading, of course.  Recent favorite reads:  The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, and Blonde Roots, by Bernardine Evaristo.