EDUCATION

Ph.D. Stanford University, Department of English, June 1998.

Specialization: Nineteenth-century British Literature & Society

Dissertation: "The Victorian Colonial Romance; Conjuring up New Zealand in Nineteenth-Century English Literature"

Directors: Professor Robert Polhemus, Professor Regenia Gagnier; Professor Barbara Gelpi.

MA. First Class Honors, University of Auckland, New Zealand, Department of English, January 1989. Thesis: "Baring the Throat to the Knife; Violence and the Body in Margaret Atwood's Novels."

BA. University of Auckland, New Zealand, Department of English, December 1986.

ACADEMIC AWARDS

Fall 2004: Faculty Research Grant, New Mexico Highlands University.

June 1999: Alden Prize for the most distinguished doctoral dissertation in the Department of English, Stanford University.

1998-1999: Stanford Postdoctoral Fellowship in English.

1997-8: New Zealand Federation of University Women Fellowship.

1996-7: English Department Fellowship, Stanford University.

1995: Graduate Research Opportunity Award, Stanford University.

1990-1995: English Department Fellowship, Stanford University.

1989-1990: Ph.D. University Grants Committee Scholarship, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

1987: Senior Scholarship, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

1987: John Tinline English Prize, University of Auckland, New Zealand.

PUBLICATIONS AND PRESENTATIONS

"Shall we never shed blood? Romance or Realism in Robert Louis Stevenson's South Seas." Presented at The Third Annual New Mexico Highlands University Faculty and Student Research Day, New Mexico Highlands University, 22 April 2005.

"Objects of Terror in the South Seas: Robert Louis Stevenson and South Sea Tales." Presented at the "Victorian Terrors" Conference, The Dickens Project, University of California, Santa Cruz, 5-7 August, 2004.

"The Space Between Life and Death; Euthanasia, Cannibalism, and Colonial Extinction in Trollope's Australia and New Zealand and The Fixed Period," in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, An Interdisciplinary Journal. Issue 25. 2, Summer 2003.

"Missionary Moreau and the Native Beast-People; H. G. Wells, The Missions, and Polynesia." Presented at "The Victorian World: Britain, the Empire, and the United States in the Nineteenth Century." The Sixth Annual Conference of the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States, UCLA, Los Angeles, 25-27 October 2001.

"Paradise or Hell: Ranolf and Amohia, The New Zealand Colony, and Alfred Domett," in "The Idea of Place," special number, Australian-Canadian Studies. Vol. 18. Nos. 1 & 2 (2000): 113-28.

"'Repeal the Unions; Restore the Heptarchy!' Anthony Trollope, 'The State of Ireland,' and the Distance of English Rule." Presented at "Defining Colonies," Third Galway Conference on Colonialism, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland, 17-20 June 1999.

"Digging Potatoes; Sex and the 'Working Business' in Arthur Hugh Clough's The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich (1848)." Presented at the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States Annual Conference, Vancouver, Washington, October 1998.

"Teaching 'the Pacific' to Stanford Freshmen; Pacific Voices and the Globalization of Culture." Presented at "Pacific Spaces / Global Marketplaces: Cultural Studies in Pacific Contexts," Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, July 1998.

"The Space Between Life and Death; The Contiguity of Euthanasia and Colonial Extinction in Anthony Trollope's Antipodes." Presented at the MLA Convention, Toronto, Canada, 1997.

"Barbarous Benevolence; Murder or Philanthropy? Anthony Trollope on Euthanasia, Cremation, and Colonial Extinction." Presented at the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Annual Conference, UC Berkeley, April 1997.

"Murder and Philanthropy: Trollope on Euthanasia, Cremation and Colonial Extinction." Presented at the University of Toronto, Canada. English Department Seminar, October 1996.

"Eloisa to Abelard: Alexander Pope and the Female Complaint." Presented at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. English Department Staff Seminar, July 1992.

"Margaret Atwood: Baring the Throat to the Knife." Presented at University of Auckland, New Zealand. English Department Staff Seminar, June 1990.

"New Zealand Literature." Presented at University Complutense, Madrid, University of Barcelona, Lerida, and University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, February 1990.

"Margaret Atwood: Baring the Throat to the Knife." Presented at University of Barcelona, Lerida, and University of Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, February 1990.

Work in progress:
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Colonial Romance. Book manuscript under review

"Shall We Never Shed Blood? Labor, Terror, and the Romance in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide. Under review, Victorian Studies.

TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS

Late-eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century British literature including fiction, non-fiction prose, and poetry; literature of empire; the intersection of ethnography and narrative; genre studies: the novel & the romance; Enlightenment theories of history, barbarism, civilization, sympathy, and aesthetics; the relationships between class, labor, aesthetics, and political economy; modernism; colonial & postcolonial literatures and theory; world literatures in English.

COURSES TAUGHT

Women in Literature: "Nineteenth-century Women Writers" The Nineteenth-Century British Novel.
Victorian Literature: "Imperial Highways, Victorian Literature and the British Empire"
Major British Writers: "The British Novel and Jane Austen Mania"
Twentieth-Century literature: "Modernist and Postmodernist British Fiction"
Major World Writers: "Postcolonial Literature and Theory"
Major British Writers: "British Romanticism: Lord Bryon and the "Satanic School"
Major British Writers: 1750- the present
World Literature from 1700
Research Methods for Graduate Students
Literary Theory
Composition & Rhetoric: "Ways of Reading"
Composition & Rhetoric: "Writing About Literature"
Composition & Rhetoric: "Writing Arguments"
Writing & Rhetoric: "Writing the Pacific: The Rhetoric of the Ideal and the Actual."
Writing & Critical Thinking: "Writing and the Arts of Persuasion."
Writing & Critical Thinking: "Short Stories from Oceania."

ACADEMIC SERVICE

Director of Graduate Studies in English, Department of the Humanities, New Mexico Highlands University, August 2003 - to the present.

NMHU Outcomes Assessment Committee, Spring 2003 - to the present

Organizer of The Michael T. Carroll Lecture Series in the arts and cultural studies. The lectures provide a forum for NMHU faculty and advanced graduate students to present their work to the public.

Organizer of a summer reading group for NMHU graduate students in the humanities.

Chair, Search Committee for Assistant/Associate Professorship in Composition & Rhetoric, NMHU, Spring 2005.

Volunteer Judge of Las Vegas High School student essays written for Black History Month, Fall 2004.

Chair, Search Committee for Assistant Professorship in British Literature, NMHU, Spring & Summer 2004.

Technology Committee, Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University, 2001-2.

Graduate Admissions Committee, English Department, Stanford University, 1994.

MEMBERSHIPS
Modern Language Association
National Education Association
American Federation of Teachers

LANGUAGES
English and Spanish