About

Outside the ghost town of Shakespeare, NM

I am a scholar, educator, and advocate — and yoga practitioner and instructor. My research on 16th- and 17th-century English literature explores representations of bodies in space and time and their relationship to the bodies of readers and audiences. Currently I am investigating adaptations of the writing of John Milton, the English poet and polemicist best known as the author of Paradise Lost. My book project, tentatively titled Daughters of the Miltonic Revolution, examines a range of adaptations by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women based in the United States who engage Milton’s writing to critique the American experiment and imagine a more inclusively perfect union.

As Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of New Mexico, I teach a variety of courses on early modern English literature and its adaptation. While classes on Shakespeare and Milton are my bread and butter, my undergraduate and graduate offerings include transhistorical tragic theory, inclusive Shakespeare pedagogy, and Milton in America. I lead workshops that support faculty development of more student-centered pedagogies, including strategies for engaging students authentically in the era of AI. For my excellence in teaching, I received the New Faculty Teacher of the Year Award in 2010, the Online Teacher of the Year Award in 2020, and the Presidential Teaching Fellowship for 2025-2027.

At Columbia University, my undergraduate alma mater

I bring my expertise in, and enthusiasm, for Shakespeare and Milton to the public through my podcast, Promiscuous Listening, and both in-person and online courses with various organizations, such as Politics and Prose in Washington, DC.

(Watch my 2020 conversation about Shakespeare and adaptation on PBS’s New Mexico in Focus. I name some of my favorite adaptations, including Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. I was ahead of the curve there!)

My advocacy efforts focus on improving conditions for faculty and students with disabilities. From 2020 to 2022, as Academic Leadership Faculty with the Division for Change and Empowerment (DiCE) at the University of New Mexico, I investigated conditions for faculty with disabilities in and beyond my institution. In 2025 I was named Special Advisor on Disability Affairs to the Vice President of DiCE. In this role I am developing policy recommendations for university leadership.

My scholarship, teaching, and advocacy often intersect. For example, in Milton’s Moving Bodies, recipient of the 2024 Irene Samuels Memorial Award from the Milton Society of America, I write about Alexis Smith’s Snake Path and John Milton’s Paradise Lost as artistic works in conversation about the needs of students with disabilities.

As a yoga practitioner and instructor, I bring my intellectual interests in bodies in time and space, my student-centered pedagogy, and my disability advocacy to the mat. My yoga classes foreground inspiration as both breathwork and brainwork. I urge students, whatever their age and abilities, to listen to their breath as a guide for their movement. I try to heed this advice as I too navigate our world.