She has a BA in English and Art History from Wellesley College and a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her first book, Domesticity and Design in American Women’s Literature: Stowe, Alcott, Cather, and Wharton Writing Home, was published by Routledge in 2011. Her teaching and research interests concern the connotations of place and constructions of the domestic in nineteenth through twenty-first-century American literature, as well as literary inheritance. She is also interested in developmental education policy at the university level.