Academic Publications
“‘It’s super disgusting’: deviant womanhood and Kardashian-related moral panics,” in Kardashians: A Critical Anthology, pp. 115-123 [2024]
“So what do the comments of these three men tell us about the Kardashians? In actuality, very little. What the internalized misogyny inherent in their remarks does reveal is the profound misogyny of the industry in which these men work and their freedom– arising from their relative security as white, cis-men in a white, patriarchal society– to condemn materialism in a capitalist society without working to remove the systemic barriers that contribute to the culture and people they critique.”
Review: Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood, by Rebecca Brückmann, for History [2023]
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“In Massive Resistance and Southern Womanhood, Brückmann clearly, concisely, and powerfully demonstrates how white women used Christian motherhood and white male chivalry in one case and theatrical, violent, and abusive confrontation in another to maintain their class status and access to cultural capital on the basis of racial supremacy. It’s a tremendously important contribution to this rising field of scholarship around white women’s active support of and violent contributions to massive resistance.”
A “very politically correct, wholesome family show”: Jane Seymour’s white, heterosexual femininity in Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, TV/Series [2022]
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“Often, Seymour encouraged the notion of gender difference, a view that, while a-religious, still quite neatly aligned with the evangelical concept of complementarianism, wherein gender differences are divinely ordained. […A]s the show’s second season concluded, Entertainment Weekly suggested that the feminist character Seymour embodied ‘may have become the most influential woman on network television.’ Examining the show’s engagement with gender through the lens of Seymour’s biography yields insight into how that happened, as well as revealing how white, cis-het femininity functions to render a certain type of feminism more acceptable to audiences who might be disinclined to openly accept or espouse gender equality.”
Review: Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy, by Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, for History [2020]
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“In Mothers of Massive Resistance, McRae has done an excellent job of unpacking the complexities of the regional context and opens up a rich seam for further study, particularly as regards white women’s inter-regional resistance and the anti-segregation expansion of the mid-century domestic sphere.”
“‘Matter is the Minimum’: Reading Washington, DC’s BLM Memorial Fence,” U.S. Studies Online [2020]
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“An exercise in commemoration culture laden with personal grief, the protest fence constitutes a lamentation at once local, national, and global. This is not just about Trump. Rather, it is a critical, creative, improvisational engagement with the question of what America is and what America has done, what America is still doing. Physically, situated at the intersection of presidential power and public space, collectively, the BLM memorial fence constitutes a full city block of sustained protest. Individually, the pieces comprise cries in the broader national scream.”
“‘Bad’ Biography Exposed!: A Critical Analysis of Super-pop,” Biography [2019]
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“[T]he women of super-pop move through the world in a way that is broadly recognizable: dieting, shopping, going to the bathroom, calling their mothers, experiencing gynecological and obstetrical issues, waiting for men to call, going out, eating dinner, fighting with their children, pouring a drink. The glamour-cloaked banality is perhaps an undervalued aspect of the genre’s allure and persistence. Yes, super-pop includes gossip and shocking revelations, but those were typically printed in magazine promotional spreads and newspaper reviews almost in their entirety in advance of publication (now they appear online), which suggests that actually buying and reading the book would provide something else.”
Reluctant Celebrity: Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom, by Lorraine York, for Celebrity Studies [2019]
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“The archive here is expansive: encompassing celebrity journalism, social media, biography and films. This enables York to develop a vivid and persuasive picture of the complex ways in which reluctance becomes entangled within the star text itself – spilling from a film into an interview into the biographies and perhaps, as in Craig’s case, even informing a specific performance.”
“Onassis, Elders, Obama: Dignity, Arrogance, Anger and Discourses of Modern (white) American Femininity,” Gender, Place and Culture [2019]
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“The template that “Jackie’s” image provides for women fashioning their own images and navigating their lives in the public sphere can be a source of power. However, the ways this image is used in culture to contain, reprimand and denigrate women of color, Black women in particular, are pernicious. The notion of life-narratives as timeless and benign is, therefore, absurd. They are constructs, ideologically inscribed in ways which have long-term consequences, and narratives that mean some- thing to Americans because they have, over time and at various points in time, meant quite specific things.”
“‘Watergate-ing’ (Norman Mailer’s) Marilyn: Life-writing in cultural context,” Life-Writing [2019]
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“It is a truism that biography is often more about the biographer than the biographical subject, but it is a lesser-recognised truism that biography is just as often also about the time in which it was written and in which the biographer lived.”
“Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: An afterlife in American culture,” Journal of American Studies 2019]
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“The telling shifts with each passing year, which is why 1968’s “Jackie” does not look exactly like 1973’s, much less like 1994’s or 2017’s. It is not just that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis changed during her life- time, but that the times and the context in which her story circulated and was retold changed as well, and have continued to do so after her death. Complicating this further is the multidimensionality of the life-narrative and the proliferation of competing myths within it.”
“Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in American chaos, pre-/post-9/11,” Celebrity Studies [2018]
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“This is what interested me as a biographer: what did the individuals involved in the story and those writing the story think was occurring? This is what would have motivated their responses and, although it is a question we can never entirely answer, it is one with which we can imaginatively engage to illuminating effect.”
Review: Click and Kin: Transnational Identity and Quick Media, eds. May Friedman and Silvia Schultermandl, Biography [2018]
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“Click and Kin features chapters on the Iranian, South Asian, and Chinese experiences. The diversity of the voices featured is commendable and demonstrates how valuable breadth is to scholarship. Seeing these phenomena discussed in different national and cultural contexts opens up analysis in productive ways, particularly in highlighting differences and similarities in tech- nology use across borders.”
“‘We must be ready every day, all the time’: Mid-Twentieth-Century Nuclear Anxiety, Fear of Death, and American Life,” The Journal of American Culture [2017]
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“The past was once the present. An obvious circumstance but one worth stating precisely because it is so often obscured by the way we write about the past—approaching it and every- one in it as though they had a certainty about their lives which we, the living, now lack.”
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