I am a Ph.D. candidate (A.B.D.) in the Department of English at the University of Florida, with a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies and a Master’s degree in English. I am currently living in Los Angeles completing my dissertation/book about the history of American cuteness and the reception of Japanese kawaii in the United States. My primary areas of research and teaching are Childhood Studies, Children’s and Young Adult Literature and Culture, Transnational Asian-American studies, and gender and feminist theory.
I teach English Composition, Effective Speaking, and Critical Thinking at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in downtown L.A. I am using “Fairy Tales” as the theme of my current English Composition courses. In my Critical Thinking course this quarter we are watching Crips and Bloods: Made in America and then going on a field trip to the Watts Towers in order to provide material to discuss topics including African-American and regional L.A. history, race, glamour, masculinity, heterosexuality, and gentrification. I am then showing the film Paris is Burning to both continue as well as complicate these concepts.
At the end of March, 2012, I am presenting a paper at the Cultural Studies Association Conference at the University of California, San Diego. I will be discussing the first American counting songs and books for children: “Ten Little Injuns” and Ten Little Niggers. Last November, 2011, I organized the panel, titled “ABC, It’s Easy as 123″: Fun Activities for the Pre-Reader,” at the PAMLA conference at Scripps College, Claremont, California.
For more information about me, please click on the links at the top. The links to the right are sites I recommend.