Bio

I am a cultural historian of modern France with a special interest in the relationship between textuality and sexuality. My first book, Between the Sheets: Sexuality, Classified Advertising, and the Moral Threat to Press Freedom in France (Cornell University Press, 2025), constructs the history of “immoral” classified advertising in the Parisian press during the French Third Republic (1870–1940) to show how sexual and gendered classified advertising opened up new possibilities to live non-normative lives and also inspired state and social efforts to exercise close control over both non-normative bodies and new media in the name of republican morality. I have begun work on a second book project exploring the importance of queer literature for queer history and the construction of queer lives. 

My writing has been published or is forthcoming in French Historical Studies, The American Historical Review, Gender & History, Dix-Neuf, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, Histoire, Économie & Société, Public Books, and edited volumes including Capitalism’s Hidden Worlds (UPenn P) and Queer Print Cultures: Resistance, Subversion, and Community (UToronto P). This work has been funded by a number of grants, including the ACLS Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies, the P.E.O. Scholar Award, the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Social Science Research Council Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship. My articles and presentations have been awarded the Malcolm Bowie Prize from the Society for French Studies, the Larry Schehr Memorial Award from the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association, and the Triennial Charles R. Bailey Memorial Prize from the New York State Association of European Historians.

I was previously an assistant professor of French Studies at the University of Washington and the Shauna M. Stark ’76, P’10 Postdoctoral Research Associate in Gender Studies at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. I received a B.A. in History and French Studies from Smith College in 2012 and a Ph.D. in History from Rutgers University–New Brunswick in 2020.

Research Interests

• 19th- and 20th-century French History, Literature, and Culture
• Gender and Sexuality Studies
• Queer Studies
• Print Culture
• History of Reading 
• Archival Methods