Research and teaching
interests
My research and writing falls under the working book title, Deadly
Virtue: Protestant Identity, Sexual Violence and Race in First Encounters
with Indigenous Americans. My thesis is that though many of the
individual Europeans who met indigenous Americans found them to be sympathetic,
the process of defining a new Protestant identity required resistance to
indigenous American people and cultures that resulted in sexual violence and
developed into modern racism. I contextualize these encounters within the
history of Christianity, the body, and early modern identity politics of
gender, race, and sexuality.
Currently I am writing an essay titled “The Gender
Amazon: Indigenous Female Masculinity in Early Modern European
Representations of Contact,” which has been accepted for presentation at the
Newberry Library Seminar on Women and Gender. This essay argues that
English and French men exploring the Americas for the first time carried
expectations of encountering Amazons: physically powerful, martial women
with a great deal of sexual and political agency who lived in matriarchal
societies. As a result, when they encountered real indigenous American
women within cultures that provided them with sexual, spiritual, and political
agency, these travelers were able to partially recognize alternatives to the
western gender system.
This research and my academic training draw upon a broad
array of early modern historiography, theoretical approaches, and historical
methodologies that prepare me to teach early modern Atlantic World History,
comparative colonialisms, cross-cultural encounters, the history of science,
the history of women, gender, race, class, masculinity, and sexuality, as well
as postcolonial, queer, gender, and critical race theory.
Courses taught
HIS 200: History and the Historian – Historicizing and
Theorizing Thomas Harriot’s Brief and True Report on the New Found Land
Virginia (1590)
HIS 295: US Women and Gender
HIS 300W: American Sexualities – Marriage
HIS 300W: Atlantic Slavery
HIS 300W: Travel Narratives
HIS 467: Topics in Atlantic World History – Colonizing North America
HIS 467: Topics in Atlantic World History – Early Modern Biopolitics
HIS 467: Topics in Atlantic World History – Atlantic World Encounters
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – Women in Cultural
Contact
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – American
Sexualities: Telling LGBTQ Histories
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – American
Sexualities: Marriage in America
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality History – Gender in America
1890-2010
HIS 484: Topics in Gender and Sexuality – Gender, Culture and Colonialism
in America
HIS 498C: Senior Capstone – Cross-Cultural Encounters
HIS 499: Contemporary Developments - US Immigrants and Refugees
HIS 565: Readings in Gender, Race and Class – Feminist Theory
HIS 565: Readings in Gender, Race and Class – 19th and 20th C US Gender
HIS 590: Readings in US History – Historiography of Colonial America
WGS 399: Topics in Women’s and Gender Studies – Global Queer History and
Theory
List of recent publications
“Colonial Allure: Normal Homoeroticism and Sodomy in
Sixteenth-Century French-Timucuan Encounters in Florida” Journal of the
History of Sexuality (Invited to Revise and Resubmit)
“Dirty Things: Bread, Maize, Women and Christian
Identity in 16th C America” in Trudy Eden and Kenneth Albala, eds. The
Lord’s Table Essays on Food and Christianity from the Middle Ages to the
Present and Global in Perspective (Columbia University Press, Spring 2011)
“Ferocious Appetites: Hunger, Nakedness and Identity
in Sixteenth-Century American Encounters,” in A. Scott and C. Kosso,
eds., Poverty and Prosperity in Medieval and Early Modern Times(Brepols,
Spring 2011)
“Hans Staden’s Captive Soul: Identity, Imperialism,
and Rumors of Cannibalism in Sixteenth-Century Brazil,” Journal of World
History (March 2006)
Book reviews
Eve Keller,
Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves: The Rhetoric of
Reproduction in Early Modern England. Seattle, London:
University of Washington Press, 2007. H-Net Reviews. Forthcoming