I teach and research in the areas of 20th century comparative race and ethnic studies, employing an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes literary modes of knowledge. My scholarship is at the intersection of literature, politics, and social procedures that effect how collective existence is organized, including “race” as a procedure that organizes the unequal appropriation and governance of social goods and human life.
I am currently at work on a book manuscript entitled "Killing Sympathies: U.S. Literature and the New Racism." In it, I give an account of how racial liberalism, liberal multiculturalism, and contemporary multicultural neo liberalism have each sought to define a liberal social mission for literature. I consider how, despite good intentions, race liberal ideas of what fiction is and how it should be read (i.e. to evoke sympathy) often serve to fix racial identity and to recuperate the privilege of white or American readers. At the same time, I examine how writers of color and migrant authors in the U.S. have consistently employed literary narrative to question and to expand liberal ways of thinking about race. I contend that we should think of this “race radical” practice of literature - which re imagines “race” in line with radical, global social movements and in ways that address the diverse needs of unequal histories - as a major literary movement.
In the classroom, I work with students to use literary methods and modes of knowledge to rethink received paradigms of citizenship, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, nation, immigration, community, capitalism, democracy, leadership, service, excellence, and humanity, among other rubrics. Courses such as Race, Ethnicity, and Identity in U.S. Literature (English 159) and Literature, Race, and the Making of Milwaukee after World War II (English 177) employ interdisciplinary methodologies and seek a history of the present that orients us to creative intervention now. Committed to the project of the public use of knowledge (an idea wholly coherent with the mission of MU as an private Jesuit institution), I constantly search for ways to make research and teaching at MU useful for all of Milwaukee’s communities and to open what counts as “learning” at Marquette University to the formal and informal knowledge embedded in Milwaukee’s multiple publics.
Teaching Fields
- U.S. Literature and Culture after World War I
- White Privilege and Critical Race Studies
- Cultural Studies
Office Hours
SPRING 2012
- WED 3:00-4:30
- THUR 5:00-6:00
Teaching Schedule
SPRING 2012
- 6820/101 TTH 3:30-4:45 EN128
- 8830/103 WED 2:00-2:50 TBD
- HOPR 4953/901 TTH 12:30-1:45 CU128
Research Interests
- 20th-century comparative race and ethnic studies
- Postcolonial theories of literary value
- Culture and neo liberalism
Selected Publications
- "The Killing Joke of Sympathy: Chester Himes's End of a Primitive Sounds the Limits of Mid-Century Racial Liberalism." American Literature 81 (Dec. 2008).
- “The Ruptures of American Capital,” American Literature 79,4 (Winter 2007): 843-845.
- “W.E.B. Du Bois’s UnAmerican End,” African American Review 40 (Fall 2006): 533-550.
- “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 89 (Winter 2006): 1-25.
Honors/Awards
- American Studies Association, Community Partnership Grant (2007)
- Mellon Research Grant (2007)
- Faculty Development Award, Marquette (2005)
- Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities (2002-2004)
- Social Science Research Council Fellowship (2000-2003)
- Columbia University Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy Fellowship (2001-2003)
English Department
