I\u2019m originally from San Diego, and graduated with my B.A. degree from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) in English and American Literature, with cum laude <\/em>honors from Revelle College and With Highest Distinction honors from the Department of Literature.\u00a0 My undergraduate Honor’s Thesis (which was on theories of education in the works of William Wordsworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau) won the Department of Literature’s Burckhardt Prize.\u00a0 I also studied Italian (both language and literature classes) for two years while at UCSD, and I have minors in French Literature and Political Science.<\/p>\n After graduating from UCSD, I received a French Government Fellowship (administered through the Fulbright program) that allowed me to spend a year teaching English conversation classes at a high school in France. Upon my return, I attended graduate school at Indiana University (IU), where I had received a Graduate School Fellowship.\u00a0 While at IU and during my second year of teaching, I won the William Riley Parker Prize, which is given out for outstanding teaching by a graduate student in her or his second or third year of teaching.<\/p>\n My Master\u2019s and Ph.D. degrees are in English, and I have a Ph.D. minor in French.\u00a0 My area of specialty is late-eighteenth-century British literature and Romanticism, with a secondary interest in the French literature being written during this period, but I love literature from all time periods.\u00a0 My Ph.D. dissertation analyzes texts by Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and, in 2007, it was published by Bucknell University Press as a book called Women Writing the Nation:\u00a0 National Identity, Female Community, and the British\u2013French Connection, 1770-1820.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>I have also published articles on Mary Shelley, Frances Burney, and Charlotte Smith, and entries that I have written for the The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel<\/em> are forthcoming.<\/p>\n At Palomar, I teach a variety of composition and literature courses in the English Department<\/a>, and was a Finalist seven times for Palomar’s Distinguished Faculty Award (DFA) for Excellence in Teaching, before winning the award in Spring 2019.\u00a0 In Spring 2014, I was also the co-winner of Palomar’s Gift of Time award, which is given out by Palomar’s Faculty Senate for service to the college, for my four years of work as our faculty Professional Development Coordinator.\u00a0 I’m also a faculty co-advisor for our Palomar English Majors Group<\/a>, and for the 2018-2020 academic years, I served as our English Department Writing Center<\/a> Director.\u00a0 I’m currently serving as department chair.<\/p>\n In my free time, I love hanging out with husband, family, and friends; reading novels and non-fiction texts; experimenting in the kitchen with vegan baking and cooking; learning about health, nutrition, and fitness; and working out.\u00a0 I also love traveling, and some of my favorite cities and countries I’ve been to are Italy, France, England, Greece, Croatia, Amsterdam, Prague, Budapest, Istanbul, Stockholm, and Norway.\u00a0 My biggest hobby, though, is beading (you can see photos of my work here<\/a>), and in 2016 and 2017, I served as the volunteer President of the San Diego Bead Society, a non-profit organization devoted to the art and craft of beading.<\/p>\n My research interests center around women writers, nationalism, British and French literature during the late-eighteenth century and Romantic periods, and theories of violence.\u00a0 More recently, I’ve developed an interest in the contemporary Gothic novel, and I spent my last sabbatical doing work in that area.<\/p>\n My book, Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British\u2013French Connection, 1770-1820<\/em><\/a> , was published in 2007 by Bucknell University Press as part of their Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture series.<\/p>\n Women Writing the Nation<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Women Writing the Nation <\/em>engages in recent discussions of the development of British nationalism during the eighteenth century and Romantic period.\u00a0 I argue that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender identity to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Women writers wanted to make it seem as if they were writing as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community. In essence, because British-French relations dominated the national imagination, women had to think about their own gender concerns in national terms as well.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been at Palomar College since the fall of 2002, when I was first hired on as a tenure-track English Professor \u2014 and I feel so fortunate to be at Palomar, where I have such wonderful students and colleagues! My … Continue reading My hobbies and interests<\/span>:<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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