Publications and Presentations

My scholarship and my teaching are closely intertwined. Below are my scholarly publications, creative and public-facing work, conference presentations, and invited lectures.

Scholarly publications

  • English Studies (Oct. 2025), online. 

    This publication is a significant revision of the paper I presented at the 2023 Representations of Home conference in Lisbon, Portugal. It examines the role of the modern electric refrigerator in four literary works written by American men in the years immediately following World War II. I argue that the appliance figured both nostalgia and insecurity in a rapidly changing world.  Read it here.

  • In Gardens, Flowers, and Fruit: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2024, Mark McWilliams, editor. Sheffield, UK: Equinox (July 2025), 243-251. Read it here.

  • In Food Rules and Rituals: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2023, Mark McWilliams, editor. Equinox eBooks, UK (July 2024), 237-245.

    This publication contains the work I presented at the 2023 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. I discuss four literary texts that incorporate rice-based rituals to examine the mythological and religious significances of rice in several eastern and western traditions. Read it here.

  • Co-authored with Nadia Benakli and Pamela Brown. Science Education and Civic Engagement: An International Journal 11.1 (Winter 2019).

    This peer-reviewed project report appears in a journal focused on the scholarship of teaching and learning. In it, my co-authors and I discuss a non-enrollment-linked, interdisciplinary learning community that we created using City Tech’s OpenLab. My English class participated, as did a section of Prof. Benakli’s math class and a chemistry class. Associate Provost Pam Brown was a co-author of the report as well, providing advice and support throughout the project. The project was supported by a grant from the Helmsley Foundation. Read it here.

  • in Food and American TV: Constructing Identity in Bite-Sized Narratives, edited by Carrie Helms Tippen and Urszula Niewiadomska-Flis. Under contract with Routledge.

    This essay examines the role of food in Apple TV’s award-winning show Ted Lasso, focusing specifically on the thematic and narratological ways that food empowers the characters to model various expressions of masculinity while celebrating empathy, curiosity, and group identity. The Americanness of coach Ted Lasso, who has relocated to London to coach a professional soccer team, is often signaled through his food choices, establishing the viewer’s expectation that food will serve as a vehicle for character and plot development throughout the series. The essay also examines food’s role in contextualizing Lasso’s Americanness within a global community, since many of his players are also immigrants. Food becomes an essential part of the team’s rituals of belonging that create both personal identity and a chosen family.

  • This essay will be part of an exciting collection of writing about food and its connections to familial identity and memory. Of my written work to date, I’m most proud of this essay. It combines autoethnography with critical analysis of three memoirs. The editor’s comments on my draft opened with this: “I think this is tremendous as is. It’s a standout piece in the collected volume, and I’m very excited to include it. I have no major editing comments, but I would like you to consider Iris’s comments from the peer review worksheet.” The revised manuscript has been submitted. I also reviewed a contribution to the collection, preparing a reviewer report for that piece. Lever Press is a university press.

  • In Gastrofeminism, edited by Debarati Sen, Ishita Dey, and Sohni Chakrabarti. Accepted. Publication date unk. Revised ms submitted.

    This essay grew from my presentation at MMLA in November 2022. I discuss two recent novels that feature female protagonists who are exceptional homecooks, placing their work within generations of feminist resistance.

Conference presentations

  • Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. 11-13 July 2025, in-person at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK; and 18-31 July 2025 online.

    My paper examines the growing role of technology and automation in our foodways, particularly as it appears in advertisements and science fiction, arguing that fiction enables us to foresee the potential calamaties of relying too heavily on non-human systems. 

  • Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery. 5-7 July 2024, in-person at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, UK; and 14-28 July 2024 online.

    My presentation anayzes the rhetoric in instruction manuals and television shows about gardens raised specificallly to help their owners survive a global catastrophe. 

  • With Shauna Chung and Carrie Hall. 2024 CUNY Teaching and Learning Conference, 22 March, 2024, New York, NY.

    This collaborative presentation with Profs Hall and Chung presented our web resource The Procrastination Station to our CUNY-wide colleagues. We shared the findings of our initial Utility Value Intervention study as well as efforts to replicate the study in Spring 2024. We demonstrated the site and discussed ways that UVIs and The Procrastination Station can be used across disciplines to support student retention and engagement.

  • Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, Philadelphia, PA, 5 January 2024.

    This paper examines the use of narrative elements to establish credibility in travel cookbooks written by outsiders to the region. I discuss three recent award-winning “armchair” cookbooks, ones with beautiful photography that often doesn’t show any food at all but rather serves to establish setting, mood, or empathy for a specific group of people.

  • The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, Oxford, UK, July 2023.

    My paper examines the various symbolic uses of rice to represesnt offerings of -- or requests for -- prosperity and fertility in a marriage. I incorporate information about various ways rice figures into wedding rituals across several cultures, and I examine the narrative role of rice in wedding (or family milestone) stories from the perspective of diasporic voices. Included authors are Mavis Hara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amy Silverberg, and Amy Tan. 

  • RHOME (Representations of Home in Literatures and Cultures in English), Lisbon, Portugal. 22-23 June 2023. 

    My paper examines the role of modern electric refrigerators in three American texts from the mid-twentieth century to articulate the ways that it served male protagonists who were emotionally or geographically dislocated in the early years of the Cold War. My paper sees in this innocuous household appliance a complex beacon of modernization and upheaval as well as nostalgia and conservativism. I examine Miller's Death of a Salesman, Kerouac's On the Road, and two stories from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.

  • Midwest Modern Language Association Annual Conference, 17-20 November, 2022, Minneapolis, MN.

    This paper, presented at a regional conference, uses textual analysis and cultural theory to discuss the ways two 21st-century fictional women cloak their progressive feminism in traditional and gendered relationships to home-made meals. 

  • International Conference on Food Studies: “Culinary Evolutions.” London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research: 20-21 August, 2022 (online).

    This presentation discussed the obligations of ethical food tourism, including the dangerous allure of "authentic" experiences that target only tourists. I discuss the importance of informed participation in destination foodways.

  • Devouring Men: Food, Masculinity and Power. University of St. Andrews, September 4, 2020 (online). 

    The University of St. Andrews School of English hosted this one-day conference focusing on gender and food studies. According to the article published by the University website, the conference had 23 presenters and over 80 attendees, including scholars from around the world. My presentation examined the gendered expectations within US prepper culture, particularly as they apply to the acquisition, preparation, and storage of food. I argue that prepper culture not only continues to perpetuate conservative gender roles, but that in some cases it has so exaggerated men’s roles as to expect military-grade protection and preparation. Divorced from its more mainstream status during the cold war, prepper homemaking today embraces in extremis the conventions of an America that only ever existed in myths of exceptionalism.

  • Contemporary American Fiction in the Face of Technical Innovation. Sorbonne Nouvelle and Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis Universities, Paris, France, January 23-25, 2020.

    This niche conference brought together American literature scholars from around the world to discuss the impact that technology has had on American fiction. My paper focused on the 2018 graphic novel Sabrina and its use of various representations of technology to criticize the American media’s fetishization of crime.

  • Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention, New York, NY, January  4-7, 2018.

    MLA is my field’s flagship conference; overall attendance at the 2018 conference was 6,040. Professor Megan Behrent and I worked together to propose a panel on modern-day captivity narratives. Prof. Behrent presided over the panel and submitted the proposal. My paper examines the legacy of the captivity narrative genre in popular television shows Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Orange is the New Black.

Invited presentations

  • 3 January 2023. Living Lab General Education Seminar Winter Meeting. This presentation includes material from my Teacher of the Year Ceremony Speech, with the incorporation of a demonstration of active classroom strategies.

  • Recorded guest lecture. Prof. Brad Fox. Drew University, 7 September 2021.

  • Class title: "US in the World." Prof. Karen Miller. Long Island City, NY: LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, 5 Nov 2018.

  • Class title: "The Tranquilized Fifties." Profs. Michael Thurston and Vic Katz. Northampton, MA: Smith College, 28 Nov 2018. Honorarium.

Creative / Public-Facing Work

  • Performed as part of Articulate Theatre Company’s ON-AIR/On-Stage: The Holiday Radio Plays, 14-17 December, 2017, New York, NY.  

    This short play features the staff of a radio station playing a holiday prank on their overly-ambitious colleague, using on-stage Foley effects to imitate the audio-only radio plays of yesteryear. I attended a salon reading, a rehearsal, and worked with the director to make revisions. I was invited to join the theatre company, Articulate Theatre Company, after this production.

  • I’ve written three blog posts published on the Oxford Food Symposium’s website, featuring themes related to the symposium’s activities. In addition to the yearly meeting, the OFS hosts several monthly events throughout the year and the blog is one of the ways the community stays connected. Before being published, my posts are reviewed by the OFS Administrator and Technical Director, the Symposium Chair, and a member of the Symposium Editorial Committee.

  • In The Clifton Times, 8 April 2024. Access here.  In this article for my local e-newspaper, I wrote about eclipse-related food traditions from ancient cultures around the world.

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