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ABOUT ME

News and Updates​​​ ​​

  • Come hear me talk about "'Mail Order Spinsters: The Unwed Jamestown Brides and Filles de Roi" at the Berkshire Conference for Women Historians at Santa Clara University (June 28-July 3, 2023)

  • I participated in a roundtable at WVU about reproductive justice on March 22, 2023

  • I recently delivered a lecture at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas entitled "The Pied Piper of New Guinea: The Life and Crimes of D. Carlton Gajdusek". You can watch the recording here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/watson 

  • I presented a paper entitled "The Colonial Scientist as Pied Piper: The Appetites of D. Carleton Gajdusek in Papua New Guinea" at the Challenging Narratives of European Conquest and Commemoration: The Fall of Tenochtitlan, 500 Years On conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion and Culture at Nottingham Trent University (virtual) in August 2021. 

  • Check out my essay in the Winter 2021 issue of Early American Studies entitled "Mary Kittamaquund Brent, 'The Pocahontas of Maryland:' Sex, Marriage, and Diplomacy in 17th century Chesapeake"​​

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I am the Assistant Director for the Women's and Gender Studies program at West Virginia University and a member of the Native American Studies program committee. The main focus of my job is the administration of the undergraduate program. I also supervise graduate teaching assistants in WGST and serve on graduate thesis and dissertation committees across campus. If you are a graduate student interested in working on the history of gender and sexuality, (particularly in the early modern Atlantic), or colonialism and indigeneity, please get in touch!

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Before coming to WVU, I served on the faculty of Avila University from 2012 until 2018. I took over the role of Director of Study Abroad in 2019 as well as the Interim co-Director of our first ever Honors Program. At Avila, I taught a wide range of courses including: American Experience I, American Women, Sex and Sexuality in America, American Slavery and the Slave Trade, American Empires, and Images and Realities of Gender. I was also a Visiting Assistant Professor in History and Gender & Women's Studies at Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, IN during the 2011 academic year. 

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My first book, Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World, published by NYU Press as part of the Early American Places Series, was released in April of 2015 and came out in paperback in 2017. More recently I wrote a chapter for To Feast on Us As Their Prey: Cannibalism and the Early Modern Atlantic, edited by Rachel Herrmann, for the University of Arkansas Press. I have a number of research projects in the works, so please visit my "Research" page for more information.
 

For more information, please download my CV

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