Academic Appointments
Rutgers University–Camden
2013-present: Associate Professor, English and Communication Department
2022-present: Director, Liberal Studies Program
2014-2018: Director of Graduate Studies, English Department
2012-2015: Director, Gender Studies Program
2007-2013: Assistant Professor, English Department
Education
2007: Ph.D., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia
Dissertation: Popular Reforms: Progressive Ideology and Gothic Writing 1760-1820
Advisers: Cynthia Wall, J. Paul Hunter, and Patricia Meyer Spacks
2004: M.A., English Language and Literature, University of Virginia
1998: M.Phil. (Honors), Anglo-Irish Literature, Trinity College Dublin
1996: A.B., English and Psychology, Stanford University
Publications
Books
Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century (University of Virginia Press, forthcoming 2023)
Social Reform in Gothic Writing: Fantastic Forms of Change, 1764-1834 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Peer-Reviewed Articles
“Privilege, Parenting, and Screens: Navigating Competing Priorities during the COVID Crisis,” in Public Catastrophes (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2024).
“The Queer Contact Zone: Empire and Military Masculinity in the Memoirs of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, 1750-1810.” The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation 60, no. 3 (Fall 2019): 223-51.
“Commerce, Civic Education, and Romantic Drama: Stage Illusion in Coleridge’s Remorse.” Studies in Romanticism 57, no. 4 (Winter 2018): 557-80.
“Was There Ever a Female Gothic?” Communications 3 (June 2017): 1-7. Special issue on “Studies in Horror and The Gothic.”
“I am not a Woman and a Sister: Female Soldiers in the Eighteenth-Century Contact Zone.” The Workshop 4 (2016): 103-07, 116-34.
“Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage.” In Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theatre, 1660-1830, edited by Elaine McGirr and Laura Engel, 79-104. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2014.
“Florizel and Perdita Affair, 1779-80.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, edited by Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. March 2013.
“Defiant Damsels: Gothic Space and Female Agency in Emmeline, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Secresy.” Women’s Writing 18, no. 3 (August 2011): 331-47. Re-published as part of the Women’s Writing 20th Anniversary Collection.
“Reform Ideology and Generic Structure in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 27-51.
Annotated Bibliography
“Eliza Fenwick.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism 301 (2014): 119-212.
Book Reviews
Review of Eliza Fenwick: Early Modern Feminist, by Lissa Paul. The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer 34, no. 1 (March 2020): 23-25.
Review of The New Woman Gothic: Reconfigurations of Distress, by Patricia Murphy. Women’s Writing 24, no. 3 (2017): 386-88.
Review of Ann Radcliffe Romanticism and the Gothic, by Dale Townshend and Julia Wright, eds. Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women and the Arts, 1640-1830 6, no. 1 (2016).
Review of Gothic Subjects: The Transformation of Individualism in American Fiction, 1790-1861, by Siân Silyn Roberts. Early American Literature 50, no. 2 (2015): 612-16.
Review of Transnational Gothic: Literary and Social Exchanges in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall, eds. Notes and Queries 61, no. 4 (December 2014): 616-18.
Non-Peer Reviewed Essays
“A Penny Saved? Teaching Early America with No-Cost Reading Materials.” Society for Early Americanists Newsletter 31, no. 2 (2019): 14-15.
“A Monstrous Mash-Up: Six Gothic Tales from the Eighteenth Century to Today.” American Scholar Magazine, 29 October 2018.
“Ellen Ledoux on Productivity and Reproduction.” Articulate (blog), 8 January 2018, articulateshow.org
Editorial
2013-2021: Reviews Editor, Women’s Writing (Routledge/Taylor & Francis)
Research Grants & Fellowships
2020-2021: Seminar Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers ($5658)
2018-2019: Research Council Grant, Rutgers University ($2,500)
2018-2019: Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University, Residential Fellowship ($2,011)
2017: Chawton House Library, Residential Research Fellowship, UK ($880)
2016: Digital Dispatches Grant, “Creating a Digital Edition,” ($2,030)
2015: The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Indiana University ($875)
2015: Digital Dispatches Grant, “The Digital Antiquarian,” Rutgers University ($1,700)
2013-2014: Seminar Fellowship, Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers ($4,680)
2011-2012: Faculty Research Grant, Rutgers University ($2,500)
2008-2009: Mellon Faculty Fellowship, Penn Humanities Forum ($5,000)
2008-2009: Research Council Grant, Rutgers University ($2,500)
2005-2007: Faculty Fellowship, Hereford Residential College at the University of Virginia
2005: Aubrey L. Williams Research Travel Fellowship, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies ($1,500)
2003-2005: Dean’s Fellowship, University of Virginia
2000-2003: Dupont Fellowship, University of Virginia
2002-2003: Cabell Fellowship, University of Virginia
Teaching Awards & Grants
2023: Course Development Grant, Transatlantic Literature, Rutgers ($1,799)
2021: “Remarkable 31” Award (Advancing Gender Equality on the Rutgers Campus)
2020: Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence, Rutgers University ($2,000)
2019-2020: Open & Affordable Textbooks Program Grant, Rutgers Libraries ($1,000)
2017: MA Program Enhancement Grant, Graduate School, Rutgers ($5,000)
2017: CISS Grant, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers-Camden ($10,000)
2015: Course Development Grant, Introduction to WGS, Rutgers ($3,000)
2015: Margery Somers Foster Multimedia Award for “It Gets Better When,” Douglass Library, Rutgers University ($150)
2015: Committee to Advance Our Common Purposes Grant, “Celebrating the International Day of Transgender Visibility,” Rutgers University ($2,200)
2014: Digital Studies Center Project Grant, “It Gets Better When” Rutgers ($2,380)
2013: Presidential Fellowship for Teaching Excellence, Rutgers University ($1,500)
2013: NSF Mini-grant, “Celebrating Women in STEM Fields” ($6,500)
2011-2012: Civic Engagement Faculty Fellowship, Rutgers University ($1,000)
Recent Conference Papers and Invited Presentations
2023: “Woman Warrior and Republican Mother: Competing Visions of Patriotic Femininity in the Life of Deborah Sampson,” SEA, University of Maryland.
2023: “Camaraderie and Cooperation in Louis Charles Ruotte’s The West India Washer-woman,” “Female Friendship, Collaboration, and Creativity Scholars’ Workshop,” Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
2022: “Street Life: Picturing Mothers Practicing Itinerant Trades in Eighteenth-Century London,” Virtual Friday Symposium, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
2022: “Motherhood in Chains: The Abused Pregnant Body in The History of Mary Prince (1831),” ASECS, Baltimore.
2020: “Teaching Early America with No-Cost Reading Materials,” American Literature Association, San Diego. (Cancelled due to Covid-19 Pandemic.)
2020: “Professions of the Body: The Campaign Against the Man-Midwife,” ASECS, St. Louis. (Cancelled due to Covid-19 Pandemic)
2019: “Laboring Mothers: Reproducing Women and Work in the Eighteenth Century,” Fellows’ Presentation, Yale Center for British Art.
2019: “Women’s Precarity in the Eighteenth Century” (Roundtable) and “Queering Military Disability: Mary Anne Talbot,” ASECS, Denver.
2018: “Magdalen Maternity: Representing the Prostitute Mother in Fiction and Institutional Publications,” NASSR, Brown University
2017: “Disability and the Queer Military Body in the Memoirs of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot,” Queering the Archives Symposium, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
2017: “Circulating the Gothic,” International Gothic Association panel, NASSR, Ottawa.
2017: “Military Memoirs of the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World,” Washington Early America Seminar, University of Maryland.
2017: “Military Queer Crip: Disability in Mary Ann Talbot’s Memoirs,” INCS, Philadelphia.
2016: “Commerce, Civic Education, and Stage Illusion,” ICR, Colorado Springs.
2016: “Transgender as a Historical Category,” ASECS, Pittsburgh.
2015: “The Queer Contact Zone,” ASECS, Los Angeles.
2014: “Hannah Snell at the New Wells: Transvestism and Imperial Performance,” Society of Early Americanists, London.
2014: “Stage Mothers: Maternity, Celebrity, and the Eighteenth-Century Media Revolution,” Plenary Address, EGSA Conference, Rutgers-Camden.
2013: “Representing Lady Tars: Transvestism and Seafaring in the Revolutionary World,” NASSR, Boston.
2013: “Upstairs/Downstairs: Working-class Gothic,” ASECS, Cleveland.
2012: “Reading Mary Robinson’s Memoirs,” EC/ASECS, Baltimore.
2012: “Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson,” Delaware Valley British Studies Group, Philadelphia.
2012: “ʻA sweet appearance, but a dread illusion’: The Conjuring Scene in Coleridge’s Remorse,” ERR Special Session at NASSR, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
2012: “Portrait of a Working Mother: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson,” Inter-Disciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS), University of Kentucky.
2011: “Schemes of reformation’: Defining the New Republic’s Approach to Illness in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn,” NASSR, Park City.
2011: “Transmuting the Baser Metals: Political Economy in Godwin’s St. Leon,” University of Pennsylvania Eighteenth-Century Reading Group, Philadelphia.
2011: “‘Well-meant persecutions’: Philadelphia’s 1793 Yellow Fever Outbreak in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn,” SEA, Philadelphia.
2010: “A Castle of One’s Own: Gothic in Emmeline, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and Secresy,” EC/ASECS, Pittsburgh.
2010: “‘The Great Enchantress’: Ann Radcliffe’s Celebrity and the Emerging Gothic Canon,” NASSR, Vancouver.
2010: “Cross and Crescent: Sixteenth-Century Hungary in Godwin’s St. Leon,” ASECS, Albuquerque.
2009: “A Romantic Soldier in a Gothic Landscape: The American Revolution in Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House,” CSECS, Ottawa.
2009: “Anachronistic Africans: Anti-Slavery Sentiment in Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre”
NASSR, Duke University.
2008: “Becoming ‘Mother Radcliffe’: Ann Radcliffe’s Reception History and Contemporary Feminist Scholarship,” SEASECS, Auburn University.
2007: “Romanticism and the Gothic,” panel organizer, ASECS, Atlanta.
2006: “The Difference It Makes: Writing Criticism of Texts by Writers of Multiple Genres,”
ASECS, Montreal.
2005: “Private Education, Public Reform: William Godwin, Eliza Fenwick, and Charlotte Smith,” ASECS, Las Vegas.
2004: “Godwinian Radicalism and the Institutional Gothic: Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy and Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House,” Gothic Spaces Symposium, Stirling.
2004: “The Plantation and the Polis: Reform Ideology and Nation-Building in Matthew Lewis’s Journal of a West India Proprietor,” ASECS, Boston.
Academic Outreach
2002: “Gothic Elements in Once Upon a River,” Rutgers Alumni Association Book Club
2019: “Film 101: Gaslight and the Female Gothic” Public Lecture at Ambler Theater
2018: “What Frankenstein Teaches Us at 200,” Program for Austin Tichenor’s Frankenstein, Walter K. Gordon Theater, Camden, NJ, Playbill pp. 1-2.
2013: “Poe and the Philadelphia Gothic Tradition,” Public Lecture for NEA Big Read
Media Mentions
2018: “Gothic Truth and Fiction.” Articulate, WHYY TV, Season 4, episode 3 October 25, 2018. https://articulateshow.org/videos/gothic-truth-fiction/
2017: “Chawton House Library Conversations Podcast,” May 9, 2017, https://chawtonhouse.org/2017/05/may-podcast-now-available/
2016: “Our Future is Here—And It’s Gothic” by Emmet Asher-Perrin, Tor.com, April 2016, https://www.tor.com/2016/04/21/madeline-ashby-our-future-is-here-and-its-gothic/
2015: “Unapologetically different at Rutgers University-Camden for the International Transgender Day of Visibility” by Ryan Kasley, Philadelphia Gay News, July 2015, https://epgn.com/2015/07/30/unapologetically-different-at-rutgers-university-camden-for-the-international-transgender-day-of-visibility/
2015: “Women’s and Gender Studies Students Earn Multimedia Award for It Gets Better Project Video” by Tom McLaughlin, Rutgers News Now. Spring 2015, https://news.camden.rutgers.edu/2015/04/womens-and-gender-studies-students-earn-multimedia-award-for-it-gets-better-project-video/
2015: Why Is the Gothic Enjoying a Comeback Right Now? by Lauren Sarner, Inverse, October 2015 https://www.inverse.com/article/6795-why-is-the-gothic-having-a-comeback-right-now
Teaching Experience, Rutgers University
Graduate Seminar
Literary Theory and Criticism (Spring 2020)
First-Wave Feminism (Fall 2019)
Gothic Fiction (Fall 2008, Fall 2012, Spring 2018)
Introduction to Graduate Literary Study (Fall 2016)
Writing for Publication (Spring 2016)
Women and Work in the Revolutionary Era (Fall 2013)
The Romantic Period (Spring 2008, Spring 2011, Fall 2014, Spring 2022)
Romantic Drama (Fall 2011)
Romantic Women (Fall 2009)
Undergraduate Surveys and Seminars
Foundations of Literature (Fall 2022)
English Drama 1660-1800 (Fall 2020, Spring 2023)
Literature of Horror (Fall 2020)
Transatlantic Literature (Spring 2019)
Literature Appreciation (Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2022, Fall 2022)
Travel Writing (Fall 2008, Fall 2018)
Gothic Writing (Spring 2008, Spring 2010, Spring 2012, Fall 2017, Fall 2021)
Text and Adaptation (Fall 2017, Spring 2021, Spring 2023)
Honors Romantic Women (Fall 2016)
Gender and Sexuality in Anglo-American Literature (Spring 2013, Spring 2015)
The Romantic Period (Fall 2007, Spring 2011, Spring 2013, Fall 2015)
The Queer Nineteenth Century (Spring 2014, Spring 2019)
The Novel of Sensibility (Fall 2012, Fall 2014)
Critical Methods in English (Fall 2007, Spring & Fall 2009, Spring 2012, Fall 2013)
Introduction to Women’s Studies (Fall 2011)
Women in Literature (Spring 2010, Fall 2015, Fall 2021)
Major Authors: Godwin and Dickens (Spring 2009)
Graduate Theses & Capstone Projects Supervised
Directed
2018-2019: Jessica Pitt, “A Critique of Current Pedagogical Practice: Teaching Writing in Secondary Education”
2017-2018: Gwendolynn Barbee-Yow, “The Unconquered Island: British Poetic Response to the Fall of the Corsican Republic”
2015-2016: Julian Damiani, “Queer Hedonism: The Faustian Paradigm in the Nineteenth Century”
2013-2014: Kerry Boyles, “‘Eating Death’: Hunger, Power and the Undead”
2013-2014: Benjamin Kukanis, “The Men of Dracula”
2012-2013: Megan Kahn, “Female Warriors of the Eighteenth Century”
2011-2012: Justine Spatola, “The Decadent Vampire”
2011-2012: Victoria Bowman, “Female Relationships in The History of Mary Prince”
2009-2010: Jamie Corson, “The Modernization of the Gothic Heroine” (MALS)
Advised
2017-2018: Nicholas Silcox, “Playing in the Dark: Making Space in the Anthropocene”
2015-2016: Syed Rizvi, “Sentimentality in Col. Jack”
2014-2015: Nicole Lawrence, “Victorian Women Writers and the Supernatural”
2014-2015: Ariel Grandinetti, “One Big Dark Room: Revisiting Childhood Paradoxes in Contemporary Gothic Children’s Literature”
2012-2013: Stacy Affleck, “Mythical Creatures: The Gothic/Romantic Evolution of the Pained Female Rape Victim”
2012-2103: Calin Crajko, “Christabel and the Politics of Fragmentation”
2011-2012: Michelle McGuckin, “Tolkienian Heroes”
2011-2012: Heidi Dugan, “Comic Subplots in Restoration Drama”
2010-2011: Jamie Gibbs, “Charlotte Brontë’s Materialist Gothic”
2010-2011: Gina Mercurio, “Individualism and the Ruined Woman in Print and Film”
2009-2010: Erin O’Kane, “Recent Scholarship in the Eighteenth-Century Sentimental Novel”
Independent Studies Supervised
Department of English and Communications, Graduate
2022-2023: Samantha Rohrborn, “Academic Article Writing and Publishing”
2022-2023: Nick Markellos, “Revitalizing Romanticism in the Twenty-First Century”
2020-2021: Wynn Carey, “Man-Midwives in the Eighteenth Century”
2017-2018: Gwendolyn Barbee-Yow, “Anna Barbauld”
2014-2015: Syed Rizvi, “Orientalism in the Romantic Era”
2012-2013: TK Cvetkovic, “The Novel of Sensibility”
2012-2013: Megan Kahn, “The Romantic Era”
Gender Studies Program
2013-2014: Vanessa Cappella, “The Process of Transitioning for Spouses, Partners, and Significant Others of Transsexuals”
Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers-New Brunswick
2013-2014: Jane MacDonald, “Colonization and the Nineteenth-Century Corset”
Service
Professional
2021-2022: Peer Reviewer, The Eighteenth Century, Theory and Interpretation
2017: Peer Reviewer, European Romantic Review, PMLA, Clio
2015-2018: Advisory Board Member, Liberal Arts Program, Atlantic Cape CC
2015: Peer Reviewer, Women’s Writing; Aphra Behn Online
2014: Peer Reviewer, Penn State University Press; Early American Literature
2013: Peer Reviewer, Notes and Queries
2012: Peer Reviewer, Nineteenth-Century Contexts
2010-2013: Penn Eighteenth Century Works-in-Progress Group
2009: Peer Reviewer, Blackwell Encyclopedia of the Novel, Gen. Ed. Peter Logan
2007-2012: Delaware Valley British Studies Group
Rutgers University
2023: Admitted Students Day Academic Presentation, Interdisciplinary Programs
2017-2023: Appointment and Promotions Committee, Arts & Sciences
2021-2022: Rutgers Connection Network (RCN) Faculty-to-Faculty Mentoring Program
2018-2021: Research and Funding Committee, Arts & Sciences
2018: Objective Analysis of Self and Institution Seminar (OASIS) for Academic Women
2016-2017: Secretary/Treasurer Camden Chapter, Rutgers AAUP
2016-2017: Article X Grievance Committee, Arts & Sciences
2015-2016: TA/GA Grievance Committee, Arts & Sciences
2012-2015: Director, Women’s and Gender Studies Program
2012-2015: Executive Council, Institute for Research on Women
2012-2015: Faculty Adviser, Student Gender Studies Organization
2014: Committee for Promotion and Tenure, Childhood Studies Department
2009-2013: Coordinator, Junior Faculty Research Group
2013: University Strategic Planning Committee, Robust Core of Sciences & Humanities
2011-2012: Civic Engagement Faculty Fellows Program
2007-2009: Faculty Senator
2007-2012: Women’s Studies Adviser and Senior Seminar Contributor
English Department
2023: Ad hoc Hiring Committee, Department Secretary
2020, 2016: Chair, Peer Evaluation Committee
2018-present: Undergraduate Committee
2014-2018: Director of Graduate Studies and Chair, Graduate Committee
2011-2018: English Executive Council
2014-2018: Writer’s House Committee
2015, 2013: Reading Committee, Faculty Promotion and Tenure
2011-2014: Graduate Program Committee
2013: Chair, Ad Hoc Committee on Civic Engagement
2009-2011: Writing Program Committee
2008-2009: Editor, English Department Undergraduate Catalogue
2007-2008: Student Community Relations Committee