PhD in English, conferred fall 2018 from SUNY Binghamton; certified secondary English teacher; 13 years teaching at high school and postsecondary levels.

My project, "Once More to the Garden: Education History and the American Studies Field Imaginary," argues that the historical relationship between national educational debates and methodological debates in American studies intersect at the semantic and ideological site of the educational garden. Even before kindergarten’s American arrival, an Anglo-American tradition dating to John Locke likened the education of children to the cultivation of plants.Read against formal apprenticeship, the academy, kindergarten, and school meals, reinterpretations of well-known texts demonstrate that child-plants have perpetually undercut attempts to naturalize national identity through formal schooling. From the 1823 publication of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers to the Reagan administration’s vegetal classification of ketchup to satisfy federal school meal standards, increasingly threatening and violent depictions of the saturated child-plant show that it has been a wishful, untenable paradigm on which schools' authority tenuously rests. These shifting literary and filmic depictions correlate to educational policies and practices that have misrecognized, suppressed, and underestimated schoolchildren’s collective agency.