About Me

The most magical and life-transforming part of my life is my son, Teddy, who was born in 2006.

I received my BA from Roanoke College (in the Blue Ridge Mountains), and during that time I also studied abroad in the Italian Swiss Alps at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland.  I received my MA and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado/Boulder in the Rocky Mountains. (As you might well see, I have a passion for mountains.)  While studying in Boulder, I lived in a cabin at the base of the Flatirons in Chautauqua Park. I also spent a lot of time reading and writing in my yurt, located in Crestone, Colorado.  Once I graduated, I taught for one year at The University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington; that year, I lived on a peninsula, right on Falucy Bay, and woke up to see Mount Ranier shining (on a good day) or seals swimming as I looked out my bay window.  I spent the next year as a Writer/Scholar-in-Residence at Pendle Hill, a Quaker Study Center in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, where I worked diligently on my book about early American Quaker women.  I then accepted a tenure-track position in the English Department at Eastern Illinois University and lived in Charleston, Illinois for four years.  Now, I am settled back in my home, New Jersey, and so very happy to be teaching at The College of New Jersey.

I have a passion for early American literature, history, and culture--and particularly for the study of Quaker women.  I have spent many years working in archives, reading the 17th- and 18th-century diaries and letters of these women.  This passion has led me to England (where the Quaker movement began in the late 1640s), and even to my recent homes--first, in Bucks County’s Historic Fallsington, where I lived in an original Quaker Meetinghouse built in 1728, and now, in my early 1800s home nestled in a historic Quaker village in southern New Jersey (the same village where Quaker John Woolman was born and raised).  I suppose this passion stems from my early childhood, when I attended Haddonfield Friends School.  I feel a strong connection to the early Friends and pioneers of the Delaware Valley, and I believe there is a great deal to learn from their stories.

Teddy begins to read about love