Associate Professor of History, Virginia Wesleyan University
Presentations
● “Mobility and Emancipation: Purses and the Pursuit of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century,” Presenter, National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Minneapolis, MN, November 2020 (cancelled due to Covid-19)
● “Promising Pedagogies,” Panel Chair, American Studies Association annual conference, Baltimore, MD, November 2020 (cancelled due to Covid-19)
● “The Power of the Purse: Resistance and Repression in Mid-Twentieth Century America,” Panel Organizer, “Gendered Objects: Identity, Agency, and Activism through Material Culture. ”Berkshires Conference on Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, May 2020 (cancelled due to Covid-19)
● “Purses and the Politics of Resistance,” American Studies Association, Honolulu, Nov 2019
● “The Performative Role of the Purse in American Visual Culture, 1890-1920,” The Berkshire Conference on Women, Genders, and Sexualities, Hofstra University, June 2017
● “Race, Gender, and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage, 1890-1920,” Invited Speaker, Virginia Beach Historical Society, Virginia Beach, VA, March 2018
● “The Things She Carried,” National Endowment for the Humanities, Summer Institute, Bard Graduate Center, July 2015
● “Women and the Power of the Purse,” Works in Progress, Regional Interdisciplinary Conference of Feminist Scholarship, Virginia Wesleyan College, March 2015
● “The Promises and Perils of Teaching the History of Fun,” American Historical Association, New York City, January 2015
● “Performing the Primitive in a Nerve-Wracked World,” Western Association of Women’s Historians Conference, Polytechnic University, Pomona, California, May 2014
● “The Prettiest Woman on the Stage is a Man,” Popular Culture Association/American Cultural Association, Washington D.C., March 2013
● “Sex, Savagery and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous”, Women, Professions, and Politics: A Historical Symposium in Memory of Lynn D. Gordon, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, October 2012.
● “‘She is What She Aint:’ Lillyn Brown and the Meaning of Black Male Impersonation,” The Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, June 2011.
● “‘She is What She Aint:’ Lillyn Brown and the Meaning of Black Male Impersonation,” Keynote Speaker, Susan B. Anthony Institute Undergraduate Research Conference, April 2011.
● “‘Making a Woman of Himself:’ Julian Eltinge and the Art of Female Impersonation,” InvitedSpeaker, Humanities and Social Sciences Lecture Series, Schenectady Community College, March 2011.
● “‘I Don’t Care:’ The Gender and Racial Transgressions of the Irreverent Eva Tanguay,” The Futures of American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, June 2009.
● “Cross Dressers and Race Crossers: Blackness and Gender on the American Popular Stage,” The Susan B. Anthony Institute’s Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference, University of Rochester, March 2007.
