• ENG 101. Writing I
• ENG 102. Writing II
• ENG 204. English Literature II
• ENG 370. The English Novel 1740–1850

• Ph.D., University of Edinburgh, 2021
• M.Sc., University of Edinburgh, 2014
• B.A., University of Denver, 2011

• Project Researcher, University of Denver, 2025–2026
• Writing Lab Instructor, Edinburgh Theological Seminary, 2017–2024
• Tutor, University of Edinburgh, 2019–2022
• Adjunct Instructor, Arapahoe Community College, 2015–2016
• Adjunct Instructor, Metro State University, 2015

Publications:

• “Dickensian Humor: Pathos and Laughter in Dickens’ Sympathy”, in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Humor, edited by Andy Stott, forthcoming 2027
• Review of State of Ridicule by Dan Sperrin in the British Association for Victorian Studies Newsletter, forthcoming 2027
• Victorian Humor: A History, A Narrative Theory, and The Experience of Reading, Routledge, 2026

Presentations:

• ‘“Oh dear, what nonsense I’m talking!’: Alice in Wonderland, Nonsense Humor, and the Normative.” The British Association for Victorian Studies, University of Surrey, Guildford, England, 2023
• “Gentlemanliness and Humor: How Virtue Co-opted the Language of Class.” North American Victorian Studies Association, St. Petersburg, Florida, 2018
• “Virtuous, Eligible, and Humorless Beauties: The Functions of Incongruity and Ridicule in the Characterization of Victorian Heroines.” University of Edinburgh Works In Progress Seminar, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2017
• “A Funny and Frightening Sermon: The Role of Humour in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.” British Association for Victorian Studies, Lincoln, England, 2017
• “Community, Nation, and Myth: Chesterton and Tennyson’s use of the Medieval.” Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2016
• ‘“History only of departed things, / Or a mere fiction of what never was:’ Macpherson and Tennyson in Mourning.” Conference on “Reconstruction, Restoration, Conservation: Reconciling the Past through Word and Image.” University of Dundee, Dundee, Scotland, 2014

Two primary questions I am pursuing in my reading and research in relation to humor and literature are:

First, before the emergence of the idea of the “sense of humor” as a perceptual ability or humor as a trait of personality, what cultural meaning did “humor” hold in the premodern era?

Second, to what extent does the eighteenth and nineteenth-century concept of Romantic irony—its concerns about the instability of meaning and identity—form the foundation of twentieth-century humor? 

Both of these questions revolve around the ways in which the term humor or the nexus of ideas and terms around humor (wit, ridicule, irony, laughter, etc.) interact with or attest to evolving views of the self or the individual. In contrast to nineteenth-century views, the premodern era’s view of the self was not predominantly as an individual but within a hierarchy of responsibilities and social connections. How might this cultural framing of the self change how we think about pre-modern cultural views of “humor”? Looking the other direction historically, patterns of thought in the twentieth and twenty-first century seem to exude increasing confidence in the idea of a self or individuality. Does humor, through the lens of Romantic irony, help us to understand why, despite this seeming confidence, contemporary identity is simultaneously such a contested and unstable idea?