Victorian literature, 19th-century theater, adaptations of Victorian materials, Broadway musicals, Romantic literature, literary theory, feminist theory, gender studies, myth.
- ATLAS year-long research fellowship, 2012-2013
- LSU Distinguished Faculty Award, 2012
- Board of Regents Enhancement Grant, 2009-2011
- LSU Flagship Faculty, 2011
- Sigma Tau Delta (International English Honor Society) LSU Chapter: Favorite Professor Award, 2008
- LSU Alumni Association Faculty Excellence Award, 2006
- Outstanding Academic Book award for Ruskin's Mythic Queen, Choice magazine, 1999
- Kurt Weill Foundation Award Finalist for Best Essay on Musical Theater, 1999
- Most Accommodating Faculty Award, Students with Disability Services, LSU, 1999
- Woodrow Wilson National Teacher Fellowship, 1981-1983
Books
- Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (Ohio State University Press, 2007)
- Ruskin's Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (Ohio University Press, 1999)
Editions
- Sweeney Todd: The String of Pearls, Or The Fiend of Fleet Street, by George Dibdin Pitt. Editor and Introduction, plus notes. Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Theatre and Film 38.1 (June 2011). Manchester University Press ( actual release 2012)
- Guest-Editor of Nineteenth-Century Prose 35.1 (Spring 2008). Special issue on John Ruskin.
Essays
- "Theater, Exhibition, and Spectacle in the Nineteenth Century," Companion to British Literature, edited by Robert DeMaria Jr., Heesok Chang, and Samantha Zacher (Blackwell, forthcoming 2013)
- "Can a Fellow Be a Villain All His Life?": Oliver!, Fagin, and Performing Jewishness," Nineteenth-Century Contexts 33.4 (September 2011): 371-388. Selected for republication in Best Essays on Dickens Adaptations, edited by John Glavin (Ashgate 2012).
- “Bos/z in Sweeney Todd: Dickens, Sondheim, and Victorianness," Dickens Studies Annual 42 (2011): 55-76
- “'Arcadias of Pantomime': Ruskin, Theater, and the Illustrated London News," Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jim Davis (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 41-53
- “The King and Who? Dance, Difference, and Identity in Anna Leonowens and The King and I," Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature, edited by Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010): 171-185
- “Jane Heir to the Glimmering World: Cynthia Ozick's Victorian Vision," Studies in Jewish American Literature 28 (2009): 3-13
- "Sondheim's Sweeney Todd on Stage and Screen," Victorian Literature and Culture 37.1 (2009): 301-310
- “Victorians on the Contemporary Stage,” Journal of Victorian Culture 13.2 (October 2008): 303-309
- “Re-Interpreting Ruskin,” Nineteenth-Century Prose 35.1 (Spring 2008): 1-12
- “Victorians on Broadway at the Present Time: Ruskin's Life on Stage,” Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time(2002):
- “Pantomime Truth and Gender Performance: John Ruskin on Theatre,”John Ruskin and Gender, edited by Dinah Birch and Francis O'Gorman (Palgrave 2002)
- “Myth and Gender in Ruskin's Science,”Ruskin and the Dawn of Modernism, edited by Dinah Birch (Oxford UP, 1999)
- “Mythic Language and Gender Subversion: The Case of Ruskin's Athena,” Nineteenth-Century Literature(1997)
- “Be no more housewives, but Queens; Queen Victoria in Ruskin's Domestic Mythology,” Remaking Queen Victoria, edited by Margaret Homans and Adrienne Munich (Cambridge UP1997)
- "Female and Maelstrom: The Gender Vortex in Carlyle and Ruskin” Carlyle Annual(1997)
- “Performing Goblin Market," Essays on Transgressive Readings: Reading over the Lines, edited by Georgia Johnston (Edwin Mellen 1997)
- “Gender and the Architectonics of Metaphor in Ruskin's The Ethics of the Dust,” Prose Studies(1993)
- "The Least of It: Metaphor, Metamorphosis, and Synecdoche in Frost’s ‘The Subverted Flower,’” The South Carolina Review(1989)
Annotated Bibliographies
- "Christina Rossetti." Oxford University Press Bibliographies Online (2011)
- "John Ruskin." Oxford University Press Bibliographies Online (2011)
- "Charlotte Bronte." Co-authored with Doris Raab. Oxford University Press Bibliographies Online (2011)
Works in Progress
Book manuscript tentatively called Victorians on Broadway: The Afterlife of Victorian Literature on the Musical Stage, 1951-2000
