About Me
Whenever people ask me what I do, I always think about that old party game about the different ways you’d describe yourself: the distinct, maybe idiosyncratic roles, the sometimes-overlapping groupings and categories. My professional life has been every bit like those concentric circles of identification.
I’m a professor at Tufts University in Medford, MA, where I’ve taught for more than three decades. I serve as the Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. I hold faculty appointments as Distinguished Senior Lecturer in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, the Film and Media Studies Program and the Civic Studies Program in Tufts’ School of Arts and Sciences, as well as the Department of Public Health & Community Medicine at the Tufts Medical School. I am also a Senior Fellow in media and civic engagement at the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts. I previously taught at Boston University’s College of Communication.
At Tufts, I’ve served as a faculty advisor for hundreds of students over the years. I think my greatest achievement as a teacher is my “small army” of former students working at places like Sesame Workshop, WGBH, Nickelodeon, Disney, and DreamWorks Studios, among other places, where they are really making a difference in the world of children’s media.
Throughout my years at Tufts, I’ve also organized dozens of major events, including the annual Edward R. Murrow Forum on Issues in Journalism, which has brought journalists including Ted Koppel, Dan Rather, Katie Couric, Tom Brokaw, Anderson Cooper, Christiane Amanpour, Lester Holt, Chris Hayes, Chris Wallace, Abby Phillip and Katy Tur to campus. I’ve also organized the Eliot-Pearson Awards for Excellence in Children’s Media, bringing leaders in children’s media such as the creators and researchers behind Sesame Street, Between the Lions and many others to Tufts. I think my favorite moment of all these events was when I hosted LeVar Burton, who led an auditorium-full of Tufts students in singing the Reading Rainbow song!
But that’s only part of my professional identity.
I shift gears to work on biography and history. After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America’s Greatest Poet (W.W. Norton), my dual biography of Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham, came out in 2018. More recently I’ve written another dual biography of 19th/20th century writers and Indian policy reformers Elaine Goodale Eastman and Ohíye S’a, Charles Alexander Eastman. Love and Loss After Wounded Knee: A Biography of an Extraordinary Interracial Relationship will be coming out in fall 2025 (NYU Press). And my new book project, tentatively titled Mrs. Emerson’s House, focuses on the women who lived in the Old Manse, an amazing historic house in Concord, MA. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne lived there, but you know what? There were some remarkable women who lived there across more than a century, leaving their marks upon that house. Their stories are not as well-known as those of their husbands, sons, brothers and neighbors, but they should be!
My historical articles on these and other subjects have appeared in Literary Hub, South Dakota History, the Historical Journal of Massachusetts, Journal of the Thoreau Society and other publications. I am on the steering committee of the New England Biography Series for the Massachusetts Historical Society, serve on the Lincoln Historical Society board, and have been president of the Boston Authors Club for a number of years.
I was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. My professional training began at Smith College, where I studied anthropology, sociology, and women’s history. I received my MA and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, with a focus on the sociological implications of technology in mass communication. Work emanating from my Ph.D. dissertation was published as a book, Social and Cultural Aspects of VCR Use (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1990).
Outside of my work, I’ve been very civically involved in my town, serving as chair of our School Committee for many years, appointed to the Conservation Commission, serving as chair of our town Cultural Council, and now on the Personnel Board and local Historical Society Board. When I’m not working or volunteering, you can find me taking care of my family or animals; listening to music (classical and folk); trying to get back into practicing the flute and piano (which I studied for many years quite seriously but don’t play now nearly enough, though I’ve started taking flute lessons again!); reading (eclectically); writing short stories (peripatetically); or working in the gardens (diligently) at the home at which my husband and I have lived for thirty-something years.
Undoubtedly, the achievement of which I am most proud is that I’m the mother of four amazing children. Objectively, they are quite amazing! (And no, I can’t help kvelling about them…)