I’m an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. I received my dual title PhD in Women’s Studies and Geography from Penn State University.
My teaching and scholarship are interdisciplinary in scope, drawing primarily on feminist theory, critical race theory and critical human geography. I regularly teach our introductory course in WGSS, as well as courses in my areas of speciality, including feminist approaches to violence, intersectional feminist activisms, and feminist research design and methods.
My research agenda applies a feminist analytic to examine the intersections of institutional and interpersonal violence and the structural inequalities within experiences of citizenship and security. I prioritize community-based research that incorporates local stakeholders in the research process, including designing research objectives and data collection. As a feminist geographer, I utilize ethnographic methods that support unraveling how institutional responses to gender-based violence affect survivors’ holistic security needs. As a body of work, my research advances understandings of how patriarchal and neoliberal ideology feature in legal institutions, with emphasis on the sociocultural and spatial processes within policing responses to gender-based violence and technology-enabled coercive control. With attention to scalar relationships, my research links the way local responses to gender-based violence connect to translocal processes of governance and contributes to interdisciplinary feminist scholarship that makes visible the way power operates across intimate and global scales.
My scholarship is informed by my five years of combined experience providing advocacy services survivors of intimate partner violence, sexual assault and stalking in rural Central Pennsylvania and at the University of Washington in Seattle. I also use my research and professional experiences as a victim advocate in the classroom to engage students in feminist activism and community-based research.