Biography
Lilith studies 17th- and 18th-century English and Early American literature. Her dissertation, "Tending Another," describes the rhetoric and labor of nursing in the long eighteenth century and within a global economy. It follows the ubiquity and necessity of caring for bodies alongside the simultaneous difficulty of representing practices that are non-productive, cyclical, often gross, and sit precariously between paid and unpaid labor. Chapters document the innovative formal practices that authors and practitioners adopt for figuring these bodily intimacies and constructing borders between carer and cared-for. Its archives range from biblical epics to domestic manuals, natural histories to hospital records, and georgics to cookbooks. Her research has been supported by The John Carter Brown Library and The Lewis Walpole Library. She has an article on the poetics of the nurse and washerwoman Mary Collier forthcoming in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and her essay "Health Care as Ugly Feeling in Hans Sloane's 'A Voyage'" received the 2022 ASECS Race & Empire Caucus Graduate Student Essay Prize.
Currently, she is a Literature Humanities preceptor in Columbia's Core Curriculum. Additionally, she has served as an instructor and writing consultant in Columbia's University Writing program and has ran seminars for Literary Texts, Critical Methods and The Nineteenth-Century European Novel. She also serves as a managing editor for Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities. Before coming to Columbia, she earned her B.A. in English (with honors) and in History from Brown University.
