Scholarship

I earned my Ph.D. in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden , and my research interests include children’s literature, popular culture, gender, and translation.  I have been fortunate to have my research supported by a number of fine instutiions and have received a Fulbright Fellowship to study in Romania, a Presidential Fellowship and a David K. Sengstack Fellowship from Rutgers University, and a research fellowship from the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, Wyoming. My published work includes “The Politics and Process of Abridgement,”i n  Extravio , “Composing and Performing the Self: Double-Consciousness and Octavian Nothingm,”in  Otherness: Essays and Studies “The Nineteenth-Century Dime Wester, Boyhood, and Empowered Adolescence,”in Boyhood Studies, and “Wild West Children: Performing the Frontier,” in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. I’ve written entries for Historic Sites and Landmarks That Shaped America, the Encyclopedia of Youth Cultures in America, and The Sage Encyclopedia of World Poverty and serve as a contributor to the Childhood: History and Critique podcast series.

My current book Frontiers of Boyhood, is a cultural history, exploring how discourses of boyhood and the mythology of the frontier worked to shape each other and, also, dominant American narratives of race, class, gender, and national identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.  The book extends my  dissertation analysis to include everthing from Spanish language dime novels, toy gun play, and the growth of scouting for boys.

If you’d like to know more the project, check out this video clip of me live in action on C-Span!  It’s part of a panel on child performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West I was part of at the Buffalo Bill Centennial Symposium in Cody, Wyoming in the summer of 2017.

Follow me on Academia.edu