Assistant Professor
My primary area of research is twentieth-century American literature with an emphasis on modern fiction written before World War II. A revisionist approach to literary history and ideas of literature inform my scholarship. Currently I am working on a project that explores the significance of 1930s literature, writers, and movements for subsequent developments in American cultural and literary politics. This project builds on work undertaken in my dissertation, where I examine the literary recovery, republication, and reevaluation of 1930s authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Tillie Olsen, and Michael Gold. I argue that renewed critical and popular interest in these authors, after prolonged periods of neglect, was the direct consequence of revisionist and counterhegemonic approaches to canon formation and literary history. In their recovery of Hurston and Olsen, critics, writers, and publishers helped to forge a historical and political continuity between the literary and cultural movements of the 1930s and those of their own era.
In my teaching I range a broad array of topics and genres in twentieth and twenty-first century American literature and culture. I have taught courses on poverty in the US literary imagination, modern and contemporary American fiction, and, more generally, surveys of American literature from the Civil War to the present. In addition to teaching literature, I also have substantial experience in the area of film studies; this background is reflected in my inclination toward employing course materials across different mediums and my transdisciplinary approach to critical thinking.
Teaching Fields
- 20th c. American Literature
- Modern fiction
- Literary history
- Cultural studies
Office Hours
SPRING 2012
- MWF 1:30-2:30
Teaching Schedule
SPRING 2012
- 4550/101 MWF 10:00-10:50 CU131
- 2520/102 MWF 12:00-12:50 EC119
Research Interests
- 1930's Protest Novels
Selected Publications
Honors/Awards
English Department
