BIOGRAPHY
My peripatetic academic life began with undergraduate and graduate studies at Wellesley;
the University of Munich; University of California, Berkeley; University College,
London; and (after a childrearing interval) Stony Brook University. A few years at
Princeton was followed by visiting appointments at Göttingen, Vienna, Siegen, Innsbruck,
Roehampton, Hollins, and an adjunct appointment at Stony Brook, interspersed with
visiting fellowships at Magdalen College Oxford and Clare Hall, Cambridge.
My early books and edited volumes extend gender studies into into the fields of fairy
tales, Bible stories, and children’s book illustration. Fairy Godfather: Straparola, Venice, and the Fairy Tale Tradition (2002), however, questioned prevailing fairy tale theory by incorporating book history
into discussions of fairy tale dissemination and elicited a 2010 special issue of
the Journal of American Folklore attacking my theoretical positions. An edited volume entitled Fairy Tales Framed: Forewords, Afterwords, and Critical Words (2012), a monograph Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic from Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaissance (2014), and current work on the “orphan stories” of Antone Galland’s early eighteenth-century Arabian Nights continue to fuse authorship, reading and publishing practices with studies of fairy
tales and brief narratives.
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