I am Associate Professor and Carol C. Donley Ph.D. ‘60 Endowed Chair in Biomedical Humanities and Director of the Center for Literature and Medicine at Hiram College, a liberal arts institution in Northeast Ohio. Trained as a literary historian, I bring my interests in close reading and discourse analysis to the interdisciplinary study of health and health care. 

My scholarship examines the cultural politics of health in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. My academic book project in progress, tentatively titled Invisible Property, is a literary and cultural history of miasma theory in the nineteenth-century United States. I am also a regular contributor to the online health humanities journal Synapsis and writer of creative nonfiction, currently at work on a collection of essays on cancer, literature, and medical history. My writing has appeared in venues including Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, Gordon Square Review, Los Angeles Review, River Teeth, Ploughshares, and Southern Humanities Review.

At Hiram, I teach courses on subjects such as illness narrative, the history of epidemics, narrative bioethics, death and dying, gender and medicine, and health and social justice; I also teach First Year Program courses on topics like apocalyptic comedy and haunted houses. I am passionate about developing interdisciplinary courses that help us think critically, creatively, and collaboratively about the role of the humanities in the 21st century.

Originally from western Pennsylvania, I earned an undergraduate degree in English from Vassar College, a master's degree in English and American Studies from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. I live with my husband, two sons, two cats, and canine “mute confederate,” Carlo, in a 130-year-old George Franklin Barber house, the tribulations of which I’ve chronicled.