As a writer, my focus has always been on the relationship between gender and society.

Ever since I was a young girl, there have been two intellectual constants in my life: curiosity about gender and culture. I distinctly remember wondering as my parents, much to their chagrins, read me Cinderella each night: why does Cinderella have to marry a prince to be happy? Followed quickly by this musing: Was it something about the time of princes and princesses that made marriage Cinderella’s only option?

It came as no surprise to me or anyone who knew me that I ended up not only choosing English as my major in college, but also concentrating on medieval studies and writing my senior thesis on the role of women in chivalric narratives. Through that thesis, I not only learned that, indeed, given Cinderella’s social class and lack of economic means since her father left everything to her stepmother, she needed to marry to survive, but I also learned that women’s voices have been marginalized by these very gender roles. Considering how cultures both often marginalize and silence whole groups and, in turn, how these groups find ways to disrupt systems of oppression and gain power and agency, thus moving themselves from margin to center, became the main thrust of my academic and personal political activism.

My doctoral dissertation extended this focus by considering the ways in which Irish and American modernist playwrights created space for subsets of each nation’s cultural identities that had not, as yet, been given stage time (i.e. for the Irish, Sean O’Casey staged the working class, urban Irish for the first time just as Clifford Odets gave voice to the urban, Jewish immigrant in American theaters). And now, as an American Studies scholar, I continue to wonder about the ways that American popular culture and media disseminate hegemonic ideologies about gender, race, and class, asking both how these hegemonies are responded to and in what ways they shape our cultural identities and values. Which is why, right now, I am writing a book length project that explores the relationship between Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, their music and their fans, questioning if and how this relationship is establishing a new wave of feminism.