About
I am an an Assistant Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. My first book/monograph, (P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship, examines how women writers use medical fiction to resist censorship of the female body under Comstock law. It is forthcoming July 2022. I also wrote the critical introduction for Helen Brent, M.D. (1892), a novel by Annie Nathan Meyer that I recovered with Hastings College Press and for which I won Honorable Mention for the 2021 Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW) Book Edition Award. I am an expert in the fields of American women’s literature, medical humanities, feminist disability studies, and crip affect theory, and I have published work in Legacy, Utopian Studies, and Science Fiction Studies academic journals. Education
PhD, English, University of Texas at Arlington, 2017
MA, Humanities – Studies in Literature, University of Texas at Dallas, 2011
BA, Literature, University of Texas at Dallas, 2009 Publications
Books, Peer-Reviewed:
(P)rescription Narratives: Feminist Medical Fiction and the Failure of American Censorship.
Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture Series. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. Forthcoming July. Order here:
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-p-rescription-narratives.html.
Introduction and editor of Critical Appendix.
Helen Brent, M.D. By Annie Nathan Meyer. HC Critical Edition. Hastings College Press, 2020.
Winner of Honorable Mention, 2021 Book Edition Award of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Order here:
https://sites.google.com/hastings.edu/hastings-college-press/available-titles/forgotten-texts.
Articles, Peer-Reviewed:
“Speculative Genealogies: Global Infertility and the Biopolitics of the Fertility Dystopia.”
Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers. Accepted with Minor Revisions.
“Her Body,
Herland: Reproductive Health and Dis/topian Satire in Charlotte Perkins Gilman.”
Utopian Studies 29.1 (2018): 1-20.
“Utopia, Inc.: A Manifesto for the Cyborg Corporation.”
Science Fiction Studies 44.1 (2017): 21-42.
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/covers/cov131.htm.
Book Chapters, Peer-Reviewed:
“Save Me from the Waltz: Zelda Fitzgerald and the Trauma Cultures of Expat Paris.”
American Writers in Paris: Then and Now. Ed. Ferdâ Asya. Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, Forthcoming. Essay Accepted.
“Always Already Sexual: New Materialism in Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass.”
Writing the Environment in Nineteenth Century American Literature: The Ecological Awareness of Early Scribes of Nature. Ed. Steven Petersheim and Malcolm P. Jones IV. Lexington Books, 2015. 99-115.
Public Scholarship:
“Anti-Censorship Alcott, Or How the Author of
Little Women Taught Girls to Talk Sex,”
Critical Childhood Studies (CCS) Project Blog. Feb. 16, 2022. Open-access article here:
https://ccsproject.org/2022/02/16/anti-censorship-alcott-or-how-the-author-of-little-women-taught-girls-to-talk-sex-stephanie-peebles-tavera/.
Upcoming Talks and Conferences
Exile’s Persistence: Margaret Fuller and the Public Trauma Cultures of Expat Paris. Modern Language Association Convention: “Working Conditions.” Conditions of Exile in the Nineteenth-Century and Beyond Panel, Sponsored by the Margaret Fuller Society. San Francisco, CA, Jan 5-8, 2023.
Affective Interventions: The (P)rescription Narratives of Feminist Medical Fiction. Opening Up and Intervening: Edinburgh University Press and the Interventions Book Series Roundtable. British Association of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 5th Biennial Symposium. King’s College London and Online, May 13–15, 2022. Memberships
American Literature Association (ALA)
C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists
Modern Language Association (MLA)
Society for the Study of American Women Writers (SSAWW)
Society for Utopian Studies (SUS)
