
Research
My research areas include Science Fiction, Computer History, Feminist & Queer Media Studies, and American Cultural History.

The Computer's Voice: From Star Trek to Siri
University of Minnesota Press, 2020
Considering Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Her, and more, this book explores contentious questions around gender: its fundamental constructedness, the rigidity of the gender binary, and culturally situated attitudes on male and female embodiment. Going beyond current scholarship on robots and AI to focus on voice-interactive computers, The Computer’s Voice breaks new ground in questions surrounding media, technology, and gender.
Recipient of the 2022 Popular Culture Association Emily Toth Award for Best Single Work in Women's Studies

Special Issue of Popular Culture Studies Journal on Robots & Labor
Guest Editor
[A]s the essays in this special issue demonstrate, fictional robots are often not just robots; rather, they are also metaphorical portraits of humans, representative of the ways we build systems of oppression and dehumanization. The essays presented here offer a broad array of pop culture research on robots and labor, including analyses of literature, film, television, video games, advertising, music, and fan culture. Using a range of methods and theoretical frameworks, the contributors stretch the definition of labor to include not just the literal workforce but also emotional labor, semantic labor, and the labor of birth. Throughout, they uncover new ideas about humanity’s fraught relationships with technology as well as humanity itself. I have organized these fifteen essays around broad categorizations of analysis: we begin with a theory-driven reflection on robots and labor, followed by six different cultural histories, five in-depth case studies, and finally two essays on artificial intelligence as both production and producer.
Journal Articles & Book Chapters

Reboot & Rebirth: Atificial Intelligence & Spiritual Existence in The Good Place
We Live Online
Routledge, 2023

A (Wo)Man's Touch: Doomsday Book as Critique of Metropolis
Global Perspectives on the Liminality of the Supernatural
Lexington Books, 2022

Augmenting Human Pedagogy: A Cultural History of Automation in Teaching
Popular Culture Studies Journal
2021

Networking the Counterculture: The 1970 Alternative Media Conference at Goddard College (with co-author John L. Hochheimer)
Journal of Radio and Audio Media
2016

This Aura Sucks: Narrative Cinema and Popular Poetry Critique in So I Married an Axe Murderer
Verse, Voice, & Vision
Scarecrow Press, 2013

Kitchen Sink, or The Postmodern Prometheus: Alison Maclean’s Reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Via the Cinematic Horror Genre
Short Film Studies
2011

Sex and the Single Spaceship: Reproduction and Representation in Stargate: SG-1, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Farscape
Under Review
Selected Conference Presentations

Robot Families in Domesticated Spaces: A Comparative Analysis of Place, Technology, and Family in Netflix's Extintion and I Am Mother
NeMLA 2022
Baltimore, MD

’You Were Dirty If You Looked Different’: Black Robots, Intersectional Feminism, and Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer
*CONFERENCE CANCELED*
PCA/ACA 2020
Philadelphia, PA

When Robots Choose to Die: A Survey of Robot Suicide in Science Fiction
PCA/ACA 2019
Washington, DC

Mother-Ships: Reproduction and Representation in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Stargate SG1, and Farscape
SCMS 2016
Chicago, IL