• I was born and raised in San Antonio, and although I never expected to find myself living in my hometown as an adult, I'm so glad to be a part of Trinity, where I attended countless events and, believe it or not, I won my first debate tournament in 1992.

    • “Where Pastime Only Had Been Sought: Wordsworth at the Ballet” in European Romantic Review 26.2; 2015.
    • “Energy Like Life: Byron and Ballet” in Byron Journal 42.2; 2014.
    • “The Progress of Vegetation: Subversion and Vegetarianism in Mansfield Park” in Critical Plant Studies: Philosophy, Literature, Culture, ed. Randy Laist; Rodopi Press, 2013.
    • Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins; Ashgate, 2011
    • “Good(s) Sonnets: Hopkins’s Moral Materiality” in Hopkins Quarterly 38.1-2; 2011.
    • "Pleasure in an Age of Talkers: Recontextualizing Keats' Material Sublime" in Romanticism and Pleasure: Disciplined Delights in British Literary Culture, 1780–1830, eds. Michelle Faubert and Thomas Schmid; Palgrave, 2010.
    • "So You'll See Who I Am: Inventory and Identity in Woman Hollering Creek" in Dialogues: Sandra Cisneros' Woman Hollering Creek, ed. Cecilia Donohue. Rodopi Press, 2010.
    • "Wherewith They Weave a Paradise: Keats and the Luscious Poem" in Romanticism on the Net: An International Refereed Journal Devoted to Romantic Studies 45; 2007.
    • "Justice in Epistolary Matters: Revised Rights and Deconstructed Duties in Austen's Lady Susan" in Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal On-Line 27.1; 2006.
    • "Unknown to Fortune: The Reinvention of Inheritance in Gray's 'Elegy'" in Augustan Studies 1;2002.

    Since joining the faculty in 2005, I have studied the relationship between English poetry and nineteenth-century culture, especially material culture. My first book, Poetics of Luxury in the Nineteenth Century: Keats, Tennyson, and Hopkins, described the birth and development of what I term the luscious poem--a nineteenth-century lyric subgenre that represents, both formally and thematically, the marriage of luxury to enclosure. At present, I’m completing a book that examines the influence of nineteenth-century ballet and balletic culture on the themes and forms of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I'm a formalist at heart; I most enjoy studying poetic forms and structures, and I particularly enjoy "unpacking" poems with students. We live in language, and to practice careful, critical reading-- whether the text in question is a poem, a novel, a newspaper article, or an advertisement--is, I think, to become a stronger thinker, a better citizen, and a generally wiser human being.

    • British Romantic poetry
    • Victorian poetry
    • Nineteenth-century literary medievalism and Orientalism
    • Lyric form and tradition
    • Single-author seminars in Jane Austen and John Keats
    • Nineteenth-century British women's fiction
    • Co-Adviser, Zeta Chi Sorority
    • Co-Adviser, Phi Sigma Pi Honors Fraternity
    • Pre-Law Advisory Committee
    • Major Scholarships and Fellowships Committee