About
I am a twentieth-century and contemporary literary and cultural studies scholar based in London (UK).
My areas of expertise include waste studies, the politics and representation of housework, post-1945 US literature, the history of advertising, and the politics of nostalgia, particularly for mid-century culture. I am the founder of the International Literary Waste Studies Network, which brings together scholars working on waste in literature across genres, forms, historical periods, and geographic regions. I am also the chair of British Association for American Studies' Publications and Knowledge Exchange Executive Sub-Committee, and I sit on the editorial board of the journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-Horror and the Eco-Gothic.
Having grown up between the US and Italy, and having now lived in the UK for twenty years, I am especially interested in the social construction of national identity, and the objects we use to communicate it.
You can find recent work of mine here, here, and here.
My new book on time-saving appliances and domesticity in post-45 US lit is out in hardback on 4 November 2021!
Projects
Cleaning Through Crisis
This project examines the influence of moments of socio-political unrest (including but not limited to the environmental movement of the 1960s, Second-Wave feminism, the economic crises of the 1970s, the 1980s AIDS crisis, and the 2007-2009 global financial crisis) on the depiction of domestic cleaning in British and American popular culture. I am analysing hundreds if not thousands of cleaning product ads, appliance ads, and television sitcoms and soap operas produced in this period, to understand how the notion of the "clean home" changed in response to specific anxieties and fears.
Education
September 2011 - September 2015
PhD UCL
September 2009 - September 2011
MA King's College London
September 2000 - July 2005