At UAF, I teach courses in a number of fields: women's and gender studies;  literary and cultural theory;  twentieth-century fiction, poetry, and drama; British literature from Romanticism to the present; and world literature.

My research is interdisciplinary, and emphasizes the intersection of psychoanalytic theories of gender and sexuality with twentieth-century literature, film, and culture.  These concerns animate my first scholarly book, Insane Passions: Lesbianism and Psychosis in Literature and Film, which was published in December 2006 by highly regarded Wesleyan University Press.  Insane Passions traces the now-discredited myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman from its introduction in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis and literature through to its startling reappearance in contemporary film.  Examining Jacques Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, and H.D.’s homoerotic fiction (HERmione, Asphodel, and Paint It Today) in light of feminist and queer theory, I trace the production of the “psychotic lesbian” as the limit of the social at the beginning of the twentieth century. I then proceed to analyze the significance of her spectacular reappearance at the turn of the millennium in such films as Murderous Maids, Sister My Sister, Basic Instinct, and Single White Female.  Early versions of some of the material from Insane Passions first appeared in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the most prestigious international journal in lesbian and gay studies.  I have also published scholarly articles on Franz Kafka's The Trial and James Joyce's Ulysses.  I'm presently working on articles on the modernist writers Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, and am also developing a book-length manuscript on psychoanalytic approaches to contemporary queer genders.

After receiving the A.B. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 1994 and the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California in 2001, I taught from 2001-2003 at the University of California, Santa Cruz and from 2003-2005 at California State University, Bakersfield before moving to Fairbanks in Fall 2005.

For my curriculum vitae, contact information, resources for English and Women's Studies advisees, and information on my courses at UAF, please visit my homepage at:

http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/ffcc1

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