Dr. Freeman is emerging as an important voice in the fields of American literary history and queer theory. As a   Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Penn, she will conduct research for a book she is writing on weddings and the wedding form in American literature, film, drama, and cultural practice. She also will teach an undergraduate   English course, “Love Among the Ruins: Denaturalizing the Marriage Plot,” in which students will critically examine love, the aspect of “human nature” assumed to produce the very basis for the social, and its institutional expression in marriage.