is an associate professor in the History Department and an affiliate faculty member in the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program. She teaches courses in U.S. cultural history, public history, women’s history, and American studies. Her current research seeks to understand how humans have used historic places and literary objects to connect with literature and the past. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Kansas. Her first book, Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism, was published in 2012 and is part of the Mark Twain and his Circle Series at the University of Missouri Press. She and Jennifer Harris edited the collection From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of Authors (2017). In 2023 she completed “To Keep a Birthplace”: An Administrative History of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Kennedy National Historic Site.
Her course on American Icons includes a popular Barbie unit. As a result, she and Jennifer Harris are putting together a collection about Barbie, her “stuff,” and the doll’s impact on American culture and beyond. Click here for the CFP.
She is also currently working on a long-term study on the history of Americans’ obsession with the childhoods and childhood homes homes of U.S. presidents, tentatively entitled: Rose Kennedy, The National Park Service, and the Invention of Presidential Childhood.
She is fascinated by EVERY house museum (and doll house!) and would love to visit all 15,000 in the U.S. She has been teaching at Temple since 2012.