I graduated with High Honors from the University of Michigan in 2013 with a degree in History. My senior thesis focused on the construction and consolidation of social status, national identity, and political power by women in the Early Republic through the authorship of cookbooks and the cultivation of a specifically “American” notion of taste. While at Michigan, I worked as a research assistant at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies investigating the disruption of scientific progress across Europe by military conflict in the late eighteenth century. I also spent a summer as an intern at the Newberry Library, and served as Senior Editor of the Michigan Journal of History.
I moved to Oxford after graduation to work at a small specialist publisher, but soon found myself drawn back to library work. As a library assistant at the Weston Library, the Bodleian Libraries’ Special Collections division, I was introduced to the opportunities and challenges of working with rare materials. I’ve since earned a Master of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While there, I worked as a cataloger for the Cavagna Sangiuliani Collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, creating unique records for a subcollection of early printed material in Italian, Latin, German, and Spanish. Later, as the Velde Public Services Graduate Assistant, I led classes and tours, designed exhibits, and processed a collection of maps from the 15th-19th centuries. I also have experience working in archives and museums, including as a volunteer at the Chicago History Museum processing and encoding finding aids of photographic materials and works on paper. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend several conferences, including the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2012) and RBMS (2017), as well as presenting at BOBCATSSS (2017) in Tampere, Finland.
My work has allowed me to pursue my research interests across the histories of communication, taste, texts, and intellectual organization. I look forward to deepening my understanding of how intellectual concepts rooted in material culture, such as recipes, are translated and transcribed across nationalities, formats, and technologies.
