Education:

Employment:

Awards and Honors:

Publications:

• "Charlotte Smith and 'The Swallow': Migration and Authorship" (accepted for an essay collection under submission).
• Review of Susan Scott Parrish’s American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. In Early Science and Medicine XII(1), 2007, pp. 112-13.
• "The Epistolary Novel": Encyclopedia of British Literature (Oxford Univ. Press, 2006).
• Review of Ted Dadswell’s The Selborne Pioneer: Gilbert White as Naturalist and Scientist. In Early Science and Medicine, IX(2), 2004.
• "Enlightenment Landscapes": Encyclopedia of Enlightenment (Oxford Univ. Press, 2003).
• Review of James How’s Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s “Clarissa”. In Prose Studies 26(3), 2003, 437-40.
• "'Perfect' Flowers, Monstrous Women: Eighteenth-Century Botany and the Modern Gendered Subject," in 'Defects': Engendering the Modern Body, eds. H. Deutsch and F. Nussbaum (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000).
• Review of Thomas O. Beebee’s Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500-1850. In Eighteenth-Century Fiction, October 2000.
• "Crown Forests and Female Georgic: Franes Burney and the Reconstruction of Britishness," in The Country and the City Revisited, eds. D. Landry, G. Maclean, and J. Ward (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Review of Ann B. Shteir's Cultivating Women, Cultivating Flowers: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860. In Victorian Studies, Autumn 1997.
• Review of Nigel Everett's The Tory View of Landscape. Criticism, Winter 1997.
• Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford University Press, 1996).
• "The Limping Woman and the Public Sphere in the Lettres persanes," in Body and Text in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Veronica Kelly and Dorothea von Mücke (Stanford University Press, 1994).
• "Going Public: The Letter and the Contract in Fanni Butlerd." Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1), 1990, pp. 21-45.
• "Selborne's Cultural Landscapes," in Cultural Landscapes: Gilbert White and "The Natural History of Selborne" (Stanford University Libraries, 1989), pp. 14-36.

Work in Progress:

"British Silva Culture: Trees and Forests in Long-Eighteenth-Century Literature."
This is the first book-length study of trees in the cultural media of the 1650s to the 1820s. Chapters examine how trees and forests were represented in poetry, novels, travel narratives, natural-history writing, silvicultural manuals, and the visual arts, in the context of the material history of timber management and public and private land ownership. At the same time that Britain’s forests at home and abroad were being managed for increased timber production, named “pet” trees and forests became repositories for new kinds of affect and new models of literary authority. Representations of trees and forests underwrote the construction of national and personal identities in literature and culture, and grounded philosophical and political debates about utilitarianism and other modes of value.

Selected Conference and Colloquium Presentations:

• "Arboreal Values." Department of English, University of Oregon, February 2008.
• "Arboreal Values: Dead Trees in Seward, Smith, and Austen." American Society for 18th.c. Studies, Portland, OR, March 2008. Also, roundtable discussion: "Poetry, Technology, Canonicity."
• "Trees Talk Back." ASECS, Atlanta, March, 2007.
• "Improvement and Oak Exceptionalism, 1653-1781." ASECS, Montreal, April 2006.
• "John Evelyn’s Sylva and the Political Agenda of Natural History." ASECS, Las Vegas, April 2005.
• "Sylva: One Hundred Years of Natural History." DeBartolo Conference on Eighteenth-C. Studies, February 2005.
• "Charlotte Smith and 'The Swallow': Migration and Romantic Authorship." Presented by invitation to the Southern California Eighteenth-Century Studies group, January 2003, and to the Berkeley Eighteenth-Century Studies Working Group, November 2002. Also presented by invitation to the UCSB Department of History Gender Studies group, March 2003. A shorter version was delivered at the Northwest Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Seattle, November 2002.
• "The 'window in the breast': Gender and Epistolarity in Wright of Derby's Early Candlelight Studies." American Society for 18th-C. Studies, April 2000.
• "Enlightenment Landscapes." Series on Enlightenment Studies, co-sponsored by the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the Karpeles Manuscript Library, November, 1999.
• "Landscaping Nationalism: 'Celtic Fringe' Landscapes in Late 18th-C. Literature." American Conference on Romanticism, October, 1998.
• "Enterprising Letters: Defoe, Correspondence, and the Public Sphere." Modern Language Association, December, 1997.
• "'Perfect' Flowers, Monstrous Women." UCLA Center for 17th- and 18th-C. Studies workshop: "Monstrosity, Deformity, and Gender," October 1996.
• "Natural Identities." Northeastern American Society for 18th-C. Studies, September, 1996.
• "'China': Horner and the Critics." ASECS, March 1996.
• "Natural Histories, National Identities." Stanford Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution conference: "Regimes of Description," January 1996.
• "The Gothic Novel: Austen's 'Commodity Gothic."' Lecture for the Association of Yale Alumni Annual Seminar, June 1995.
• "Cultural Landscapes in 18th-C. Painting." Lecture/museum tour for the Docent Program, Yale Center for British Art, November 1994.
• "Crown Forests and Natural History." MLA panel, December 1993.
• Discussant, Round Table on "Women's Writing." NEASECS, October 1993.
• "Touring the New Forest: Nature and Society in Burney's The Wanderer." NEASECS, October 1993.
• "Jane Austen and Domestic Tourism." Lecture, Middlebury College, March 1992. (Versions of this lecture were also delivered at Tunxis Community College, April 1992, and for the Association of Yale Alumni Annual Seminar, June 1991.)
• "'Involuntary Motions': Erasmus Darwin, Natural History, and Female Education." MLA, December 1991.
• Discussant, "Gender and Women's Issues at Yale," 1991 Pre-Registration Orientation.Program.
• "Familializing the Public Sphere: Charlotte Cibber Charke." ASECS, April 1991.
• "Beyond the Ha-Ha." Lecture, New York Society for 18th-C. Studies, March 1991.
• "The Space of the 'Natural': the Example of White's Natural History of Selborne." ASECS, April, 1990.

Professional Activities:

Manuscript referee for Yale University Press; University of Delaware Press; University Press of Virginia.

Article referee for Eighteenth-Century Life; Yale Journal of Criticism; Signs; Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture.

University Service: