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About Me

I earned my Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Riverside, where I researched Victorian literature in relation to the history of science. I have special expertise in the way that Victorian Science and science fiction has been re-worked into film and television from the 1990s to present.

I wrote my first thesis about Victorian monsters, with a specific emphasis on H.G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race, and others. I spent over a year working intimately with the diaries, letters, and first editions of work by Mary Shelley, so I have often been consulted about Frankenstein.

I have taught film and television classes at California State University Los Angeles, as well as Moreno Valley College and the University of California, Riverside. My course topics include “Sherlock Holmes in Popular Media” (which pairs The Hound of the Baskervilles with numerous Holmes films), “Buffy Versus Dracula” (which pairs Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Stoker’s Dracula and Le Fanu’s Carmilla). I am currently the host of the academic radio show Podcast 13.

My dissertation, Scientifically Sound: Auditory Observation in Nineteenth Century Literature and Evolutionary Biology, traced Phonetic Shorthand, Morse code, and Braille—all of which are dot-and-dash writing systems—as they emerged simultaneously in the 1830s and grew in popularity through the latter half of the nineteenth century. This timeline corresponds to the period that Charles Darwin, who embarked on his voyage of the Beagle in 1831, and published the Origin of Species in 1859, was conducting some of his most influential research. I have spent time studying the journals and notebooks of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University, and as an academic scholar, most of my publications are about Darwin’s early life and work.

Recent Publications

Radio Appearances:

Podcast Guest: Middlemarch by George Eliot on the F*ckbois Of Literature (FBOL) Podcast.

Podcast Guest: Nineteenth-Century horror stories on Victorian Scribblers podcast.

Host of Podcast 13: Steampunk and Victorian Studies in Syfy’s Warehouse 13 television show.

Lectures & Television:

Lecture: Mary Shelley’s Life and Works, at the Riverside Dickens Festival 

It’s Alive: How Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Changed the World, at the Pasadena Antiquarian Book Fair, filmed for television by Out and About with Roger Martin.

Production Assistant, James Cameron’s The Story of Science Fiction

Academic Publications:

“Should Victorian Studies Be Posthuman?” Roundtable discussion with interdisciplinary scholars, commissioned and edited by Megan Ward. Victorian Review 48.1, 2022.

“Darwin’s Birdsong: Sound Studies and Darwinian Aesthetics,” in After Darwin, eds. Devin Griffiths and Deanna Kreisel. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

“Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Annotated bibliography for researchers. Commissioned by Oxford Bibliographies Online, September 2021.

“Science Fiction Double Feature,” Symposium piece on Mary Shelley’s sexuality and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and 200 years of women in sf. Science Fiction Film and Television 11.2, June 2018.

Online Articles:

The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter: Human-Directed Evolution in Theodora Goss’s Victorian Crossover Novel

Different Houses Built on the Same Foundation: Science and Spiritualism in V.E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic Trilogy

She Seems Dead, But She’s a Vampire, Right? Remediating Carmilla through Victorian Webculture

Media Coverage

Social Media

@Mirandactl

Country Focus

England, Great Britain, Britain, Ireland

Expertise by Geography

British Isles

Expertise by Chronology

19th century

Expertise by Topic

Disability, Gender, Higher Ed, Literary History, Material Culture, Medicine, Museums, Science, Sexuality, Technology, Women