She earned her Ph.D. and M. Phil. at the Graduate Center - CUNY and her B.A. at Bennington College. Her research interests lie in exploring the relationships between fin de siècle psychological writing – especially its conceptions of “pathologicial” imaginative functions like hysteria or hebephrenia - and the era’s fantastic literature. Her current research project, Daydream Believers: Female Imagination in the Women’s Fin de Siècle Fantastic Fiction (1880-1900), focuses on women’s use of ‘fantastic’ genres to complicate and challenge the prevailing gendered pathologies of imagination. It asks what new representations of female creativity were made possible by non-realistic and narratively flexible modes like supernatural thrillers, fairy tales and ghost stories.