In the spring of 2025, I completed my PhD in English Literature at the University of British Columbia. Working in narrative theory and feminist thought, I looked at a genre of writing that has at its core a critique of romance, what I termed critical-romance narratives. The novels in my dissertation represented a variety of genres, from feminist writing to kitchen sink realism, dystopia, historical fiction, and experimental prose; but they were all united by an underlying skepticism towards inherited narratives of success, femininity, womanhood, and what the experience of being “female” means as those experiences are so often aligned with romance and love.

My focus in this research has shifted slightly to become my current book project. While I still explore how women use fiction to critique socio-cultural narratives of romance, my attention has turned towards the idea that everyone has a story of romance and how these stories motivate presentations and inhabitances of gender and sexuality.

My other scholarship includes a forthcoming article on “difficulty” in the post-secondary educational setting in “Encountering the ‘Difficult’ Text: Teaching Nalo Hopkinson’s ‘Inselberg’” (Studies in Canadian Literature). My recently published “The Gloriously Ugly in Marian Engel’s No Clouds of Glory (Sarah Bastard’s Notebook)” (Canadian Literature) theorizes what it means to glory in the ugly of being female.

My most recent article submission looks at the “not until…” consensual intimacies in kink and BDSM cultures to explore how gender emerges re-imagined not as a kind of social coherence but as a radical connection to the self and to ways of dwelling through unknowing in the world.

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