Welcome statement (teaching/research/personal interests): I developed and taught American Studies curriculum for four years prior to returning to graduate school in 2001 for my masters in psychology. Thus my teaching and research explores literature and culture “in conversation” with other disciplinary discourses: history, urban planning, economics, and other social sciences, etc. My degree and clinical practice in psychology has launched me into “interdisciplinarity” in even more complicated, but certainly rewarding, ways as I move between the classroom and the clinic. Both careers are driven by a social justice mission and infused with my research and experience with individuals and groups who seems to fall outside or slip between the cracks of the social contract of American democracy. My young son Sam reminds me on a daily basis of the ultimate importance of making room for story-telling and of witnessing one another’s stories.

Interests: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century American Literature, Harlem Renaissance, literature and psychology, trauma theory and narratives, creative and research writing.

Current and Recent Courses: English 110: Questions of Democracy/Democracy in Question; English 120: Narratives of Trauma and Haunting; Psychology 291: Writing for Psychology Majors; Literature and Psychology Alumni Seminar

Dream or Future Courses: I love bringing my disciplines together in my current literature and psychology seminar, in which we are reading Freud alongside of current neo-Freudian theories, phenomenology, and a wonderful set of contemporary novels by Art Spiegelman, Salley Vickers, Aimee Bender, and others. I would love to bring this course to the English department.