I am an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Haven. My research focuses on nineteenth-century literature and culture, narratology, scholarly text encoding, and open educational practices. My work has appeared in Victorian Literature and Culture, Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, Scholarly Editing, and Victoriographies. With Matt Wranovix, I served as PI on the Open Pedagogy Project, funded by the Davis Educational Foundation. I am currently working with a team of humanities faculty to build The Connected Core, an initiative to remove the barriers that often stop professionally minded students from engaging with the arts and humanities.
My current book project is Searching for Wonder, an openly licensed book designed to support those who want to teach literature with student-selected texts. I am also working with a team of faculty and developers to build WonderCat, a relational database of story experiences that users can peruse and expand by sharing their own experiences. The tool is an alternative to recommender systems that deliver predictions based on demographics and user behavior. Designed for use in the classroom, WonderCat encourages agency and democratic engagement with scholarly expertise.
