I am an assistant professor of early modern European history and women's studies at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey.

My recent research has focused on reconstructing the impact early modern relations between France and the Ottoman Empire had upon eighteenth-century French culture and identity formation. Today's strained relationship between the civilizations of Islam and the West demonstrates a profound need to better understand the ties which have historically bound these two worlds. Using diplomatic records, travel and literary works, and popular engravings, my work of the past ten years examines how conflicting French images of the Turks and the Ottoman Empire were employed in the creation of individual and national identities within Old Regime France between the 1660s and the 1780s.

I have published five essays on eighteenth-century turquerie and one essay on Sophie Germain, a Napoleonic-era French mathematician.

Early modern Europe, eighteenth-century France, women's and gender history, France and the Ottoman Empire, identity formation, coffee, gender and science.