Member, Executive Committee of the Society for French Historical Studies (2018-present)

Past Editor-in-Chief, Canadian Journal of History/Annales canadiennes d'histoire (2012-2015)

My work has appeared in French Historical Studies, Sartre Studies International, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Cahiers Bataille, H-France Review, the Journal of the Western Society for French History, and in the volume Sexing Political Culture in the History of France (Alison Moore, ed., 2012).  

I regularly teach the MA seminar on contemporary historiography as well as undergraduate courses on modern European history, including "Twentieth-Century Europe" and "Exploring Modern European Thought and Culture."  I offer a senior seminar entitled "Fascism, Gender, and Sexuality," and supervise comprehensive fields in European intellectual and cultural history and in European gender and sexuality history.  I also regularly offer a taught-abroad course in Paris as well as an experiential learning course on human rights history in partnership with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  

Cultural History Culture Fascism Feminist Theory France Gender Homosexuality Intellectual History Literature Mass Media Memory Postmodernism Sexuality

I am a specialist in French intellectual and cultural history with a focus on gender and sexuality.  I am currently working on a book manuscript, The Burden of Headlessness: How France Invented Postmodernism and Why It Still Matters, which examines how gendered discourses on the loss of difference in modern mass society shaped mainstream, surrealist, and 'proto-postmodern' reponses to modernity in interwar France.  I have also begun a second project, "The Second Sexuality:  Homosexuality, Literature, and Memory in Postwar France," which explores postwar literary discourse on same-sex relations as an important context in which French society constructed the memory of war, occupation, authoritarianism, and fascism.  All of my work is informed by a longstanding interest in literary, cultural, and feminist theory. 

I hold degrees in History from Northwestern University (BA, hons.), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (MA), and Brown University (AM, PhD).  Following my BA, I studied literature and philosophy at the Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris III).  While in Paris, I had the privilege of attending the seminar of the philosopher Jacques Derrida as well as courses taught respectively by the historians François Dosse and Roger Chartier.  I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to study at UNC with Professor Lloyd Kramer and at Brown with Professor Carolyn Dean, who supervised my work, and with Professors Volker Berghahn, Mary Ann Doane, and Mary Gluck.  At Northwestern, I was deeply influenced by Professors Carolyn Dean, Nancy Fraser, Robert Lerner, Karen Halttunen, David Joravsky, Michael Warner, and especially Dwight Conquergood.