University of California, Los Angeles

Alumna, English

Ph.D. 2008

Thesis Title: The Games Fairies Play: Otherworld Intruders in Medieval English and Celtic Literary Narrative

About

Since 1992 my personal business card has described me as a Digital Medievalist.

It's the best way I know to describe my training, my occupation, and my interests.

I am trained as a medievalist, earning a Ph.D. in English form UCLA in 2008. I started studying medieval English literature as an undergraduate, and continued to emphasize things medieval and philological during graduate school. My doctoral dissertation concerns medieval English and Celtic literatures (it's about medieval fairies as Other, really).

My teaching experience includes sophomore survey English literature courses from Medieval to Romantic, Shakespeare for non-majors, freshman composition and composition for under prepared students, and introduction to literature classes. I have also taught corporate and business writing, and revising for Engineers. I frequently teach composition classes in a computer lab, and always include appropriate use of online resources and multimedia.

I have considerable expertise in teaching HTML, multimedia development with QuickTime, and creating and teaching with Learning Management systems like Blackboard and Moodle, as well as blogging for instructional use.

I have published articles on Tolkien in The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Ed. Michael Drout, and on Welsh mythology in The Encyclopedia of Storytelling. Ed. Josepha Sherman, and  reviews of medieval scholarly books in Comitatus. I have delivered papers on digitizing for scholarly inquiry, blogging, and utilizing the Web for scholarship and publication. I have edited and written a number of books, chapters, and documentation, for a number of in house proprietary tools, and consumer software applications, particularly for the Macintosh.

Though my academic training predisposes me to work in the realm of codices and manuscripts, my professional life has largely been in the silicon realm. I've earned most of my living as a multimedia producer and digital technology consultant in the humanities. I have worked on CD-ROMs and Expanded Books™ from the Voyager Company and Calliope Media, and advised on a number of scholarly multimedia and hypertext projects. I worked with faculty and graduate students in UCLA's Humanities division to promote teaching with technology, and attended to the care and feeding of over six hundred class web sites a quarter, and incorporated digital technology and multimedia into online and off-line pedagogy.

I have also consulted for firms instituting technology use policies, researched intellectual property rights, and worked on various aspects of Internet use and policy implementation. I'm the technical editor of several consumer books about AppleScript, iLife, and Macintosh technology in general.

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