(Relatively Recent) Past Events:
2023
In April I spoke at the Colby College English Department Faculty Salon, where I read a section of my book manuscript which details archival research into unusual cases of rape in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England.
In March I gave a talk at the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Meeting entitled, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl, Part II.” I also participated in a roundtable on the topic of Academic Precarity, which was sparsely attended exclusively by precarious scholars. We laughed, we cried, and we shook our fists at the sky. Most of all, we wished that secure scholars with some power to affect the landscape of the field had been there to work with us.
In January, I was delighted to participate in a roundtable on the topic of “Milton without Miltonists,” sponsored by the Milton Society of America, at the annual Modern Language Association Annual Meeting.
2022
In April, I gave invited talks on reading sexual violence in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles and in the history of nineteenth-century medicine at Hawaii Pacific University and Bowdoin College, respectively. I also spoke on the Plenary Panel on the topic of “Fieldwork” at the Northeast Victorian Studies Annual Meeting.
In March, I was honored to visit a course at Siena College to speak with students who had read my essay “Rereading Rape in the Critical Canon.”
In February, I participated in a roundtable on the topic of “Women and the Law” for the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Meeting, and in January I was a participant on the Roundtable on “Collaboration in Journal Publishing” for the Modern Language Association’s Annual Meeting.
2021
For the CUNY Victorian Seminar, I gave an invited talk entitled “Medical Rape in the Nineteenth Century: The Cases of Sara Baartman and Flora Hastings.” This paper explores the ways in which what counts as “medicine” can sometimes conceal sexual violence through two famous cases of nineteenth-century women.
For the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting I convened a panel (with Dr. Michael Dango) on the topic of “Theorizing Rape and Aesthetics in 2021.” I delivered a paper entitled “When the Archive is a Crime,” which explores the ethics of using objects from archives that represent or are connected to historical atrocities (in this case sexual violence).
At the American Society of Eighteenth Century Studies Annual Meeting, I convened a panel entitled “Imperial Fantasies of Sex in Oceania,” where I spoke about my new project, which interrogates fantasies of sexual contact in interactions between Oceania and the Global North during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
At ASECS, I also spoke on the ethics of reproduction in the archive for the panel “Reproductive Justice, c18-c21.”
At the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting, I spoke on a roundtable convened by Helena Michie and Renee Fox on the topic of “Sexual Violence, the Victorians, and #MeToo”. I had planned to speak about depictions of sexual violence in Trollope’s novels, but given the date (the event took place on January 7th, 2021), I used my time to reflect on the relationship between sexual violence in America and linguistic violence in contemporary American political discourse.
2020
All the events in which I had planned to participate in 2020 were rescheduled due to COVID-19.
2019
I attended NAVSA 19, and delivered a paper entitled “Rereading Rape in Tess of the d’Urbervilles: Or, the Costs of Adjudicative Criticism.”
I organized and chaired a panel at ASECS 2019 entitled “Early Incels: the Legacy of Eighteenth-Century Misogyny.” Read the call for papers here.
I spoke on the “50 Years of Richardson” Roundtable at ASECS 2019, delivering a paper entitled “The Novel That Never Ends.”
I co-organized a special session for MLA 2019 entitled “Theorizing the New Rape Studies” with Doreen Thierauf. I’ll be talking about my critique of the critical practice I call “adjudicative reading.” Read a full description here.
2018
I was honored to be invited to speak at the Center for Ethnic, Racial and Religious Understanding (CERRU) as part of their yearly Innovation Exchange. The topic was #metoo. You can check out video of the event here.
I organized and spoke on a roundtable for the National Women’s Studies Association Annual Meeting (NWSA) 2018 entitled “Imagine a World Without Rape.”
2017
I spoke on “The Origins of the Rape-As-Aberration Plot,” at the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies Annual Meeting (ASECS) in Orlando, FL.
I spoke on “Teaching the Literature of Sexual Violence in the Ear of the Trigger Warning,” at NWSA 2017 in Baltimore, MD. My talk was covered by Inside Higher Ed.
I delivered a paper entitled “Is Mr. Darcy a Rake? (And Other Questions about Austen’s Seductions),” at ASECS 2017.
I organized and presented on a panel entitled “Daring Second Glances: Rereading the Rape Narrative,” for the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). My paper was called “‘Clarissa Lives’: Rape and Epistemology in Clarissa.”
I organized and presented on a special session at MLA entitled “Framing the Rape Victim in the Long Nineteenth Century” which invited feminist theorist Carine Mardorossian (author of Framing the Rape Victim: Gender and Agency Reconsidered) to respond to applications of her theory to the literature of the nineteenth century.
Contact me for more information about any of these events, or a full list of engagements.
Image: Alice Liddell as Pomona, by Julia Margaret Cameron. Via the Met Museum.