Book
Battling Girlhood: Sympathy, Social Justice, and the Tomboy Figure in American Literature. New York: Routledge, July 2018.
Current Projects
Queer Studies and Young Adult Literature (under contract with Routledge)
Queer Friendship in Young Adult Literature (book manuscript in progress)
Articles and Book Chapters
“‘Make Boo Come Out’: Race, Sexuality, and ‘the Closet’ in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman.” Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 77 no. 4, 2025, p. 451-474.
“The Sentimental Biopolitics of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.” The Biopolitics of Childhood in the Long American Nineteenth Century, Eds. Allison Giffen and Lucia Hodgson. Routledge, 2025.
“’love of kindred spirits’: Queer Friendship and the Evangelical Bildungsroman from The Wide, Wide World to Anne of Green Gables.” Saving the World: Girlhood and Evangelicalism in the Nineteenth Century, Eds. Allison Giffen and Robin Cadwallader. Routledge, 2017. 171-87.
“Fried Green Tomatoes and The Color Purple: A Case Study in Lesbian Friendship and Cultural Controversy.” The Journal of Lesbian Studies (2017): 1-15.
“Coming of Age in the Queer South: Friendship and Social Difference in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.” Carson McCullers in the Twenty-First Century, Eds. Casey Lee Kaser and Allison Graham Bertolini. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. 143-56.
“Tomboyism and Familial Belonging in Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding: Queer Sentiments.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 7.1 (2015): 87-109.
“Educating Jo March: Plumfield, Romanticism, and the Tomboy Trajectory in the Alcott Trilogy.” Romantic Education in Nineteenth-Century American Literature: National and Transatlantic Contexts, Eds. Monika Elbert and Lesley Ginsberg. Routledge, 2014. 42-56.
“Sympathetic Jo: Tomboyism, Poverty and Race in Little Women.” Sentimentalism in Nineteenth- Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices, Ed. Mary De Jong. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013. 105-119.
“Transforming the ‘Madman’ into a ‘Saint’: The Cultural Memory Site of John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry in Antislavery Literature and History.” The Afterlife of John Brown, Eds. Andrew Taylor and Eldrid Herrington. Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. 107-120.
Shorter Pieces / Critical Companions
- “Poverty and Social Critique in Postbellum America: Little Women and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Critical Insights: Louisa May Alcott. Eds. Gregory Eiselein and Anne Phillips. Salem Press, 2016.
- “Sympathetic Alliances: Tomboys, ‘Sissy’ Boys and Queer Friendship in The Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews. 26.2 (2013): 128-133.
- “Virtue vs. Vengeance: Examining the ‘Quality of Mercy’ in the Human Relationships of The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure.” The Journal of the Wooden O Symposium. 1 (2001): 125-131.
Review Essays, Book Reviews, and Reference Works (selected)
- Review Essay, “Sympathetic Childhoods: Girl Orphans, Adoptions, and Re-Imagined Families in Sentimental Studies.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 43.1 (2015): 295-8.
- Book Review of Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood and Race from Slavery to Civil Rights. African American Review 46.1 (2013): 187-189.
- Review Essay, “Politicizing Youth: Childhood Studies on Social Change.” American Quarterly 64.1 (2012): 171-180.
- Book Review of Over the Rainbow: Queer Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Eds. Kenneth Kidd and Michelle Ann Abate. Children’s Literature 40 (2012): 287-291.
- Review of Franny Nudelman’s John Brown’s Body: Slavery, Violence and the Culture of War in Peace & Change: A Journal of Peace Research 31.4 (2006).
- Sherman Alexie headnote, The Wadsworth Themes in American Literature Series, Ed. Jay Parini. Stamford, CT: Cengage Learning, 2008.
