Biography:

"Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney" (As You Like It, IV.i.161-164).

A former student of the Andrews University English Department, I began teaching here in 1999. I returned because the English Department had provided me with a stimulating and nurturing place in which to develop a mature intellectual and spiritual life. I also loved and admired the comradery characteristic of the faculty relationships with each other and with their students.

After completing my B.A. in English with a minor in music at Andrews (1991), I earned an M.A. from The College of William and Mary (1993), and finished a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature at Purdue University (2000). My dissertation explores the formation of subjectivity within the gendered binary opposition of public and private; I look at these binaries in the fiction of Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge, two Shakespearean sources. The literature and history of the English Renaissance has fascinated me since I was a child (I even had a postcard-sized portrait of Elizabeth I in my high school locker); as a scholar and teacher, I find the Renaissance's nuanced and complex treatment of the human condition endlessly satisfying.

My husband Paul analyzes numbers instead of literature as a CPA at a public accounting firm. We enjoy entertaining, cooking, baking, kitchen gardening, and working home improvement magic.

Current Research or Professional Activities:

 Book manuscript in progress: Authorizing Shakespeare on Film and Television.

Recent research:

"Dressing the Girl/Playing the Boy: Twelfth Night Learns Soccer on the Set of She's the Man." Literature /Film Quarterly 36.2 (2008): 122-36.

"Locating the Bard:Adaptation and Authority in Michael Radford's The Merchant of Venice." Shakespeare Bulletin 25 (2007).

Presentations: Invited keynote address: "It's Not TV, It's Shakespeare: Literary-Historical Adaptation in HBO's Rome." University of Akron. Shakespeare in the Spring. April 2008.

"HBO Reads Shakespeare: Rome and the Fictions of History." Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Meetings, Cleveland, OH, November 2007.

Invited presentation: "Cross-dressing the Teaching College: Transforming the 4-4 Load or She's the Man Goes to College." University of California, Davis, Early Modern Cluster at the Davis Institute for the Humanties, Davis, CA, February 2007.