RESEARCH

As a researcher, I am passionate about stories and storytelling.

I have a specific interest in life writing and autoethnography; that is, how we tell and understand our life stories.

I work with textual and visual methods – letters, diaries, photographs, administrative records, and more – and am happiest when I can lose myself in the archives.

I have written on a range of topics, from eighteenth-century medical life writing, to feminist theory and geographies, breastfeeding selfies, maternal grief, fingerprints and the forensic self, craftivism and pedagogy, social media activisms, and transnational food histories, among others.

I’ve also published shorter form pieces in blogs. You can find my musings at History Workshop Journal Online, Storying the Past, and the SSHORE blog, among others

All of this work circles around the same main questions: How do we tell the stories of who we are? What social, cultural and political forces shape those tellings? How do we navigate the worlds we inhabit, and how do we stake our claims to belonging? Where and how do we situate our stories of self? Why do we tell these stories? What larger stories can autobiographies and autoethnographies tell? And why should we care?

Together with Marlene Kadar, I am co-editor of the Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

I have been awarded numerous grants from the  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Canada Council. In 2020, I was the recipient of the Ursula Franklin Award in Gender Studies, awarded by the Royal Society of Canada.