In my research, I am interested in how mental labor has functioned under the 20th-century-long shift to a symbolic economy: that is to say, the work of the artist in the age of art’s mechanical (and now digital) reproduction. I am working on a book project that explores the ways that writers, artists, and musicians wrote about early jazz as a way of sounding out the possibilities of American nationality, ethnic multiplicity, and machine-age work and leisure. I have more recently become interested in the kind of extra-legal concepts of authorship and ownership generated by those intellectual property communities who rely on unwritten norms enforced by “local” consent—vaudeville acts and stand-up comedians, High Modernist allusive poets and hip-hop samplers, open source programmers and academic scholars.
As a teacher of writing and literature, I likewise want my students to think about the possibilities and constraints of the scholarly demand to produce novel, useful, and non-obvious—in a word, original—work. And whether I’m asking them to produce a theater essay in the dramatic form of “Living Newspaper,” or having them propose and design an alternative American literature course syllabus, or enabling them to contribute collaboratively to a class-authored wiki on concepts of authorship and ownership, my hope is that I can to provoke students to own and author their education through introducing them to an ongoing culture of scholarship. Thus, I ask students to think of scholarship not just as research and writing meant to give shape and depth to one’s ideas, but as an intervention in the ongoing work of a discourse community to whose preceding existence the student is expected to respond, and from whom the student should expect an answer.
Teaching Fields
- Rhetoric and Composition
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American Literature
Office Hours
SPRING 20121
- Monday 10-10:50
- Wednesday 10-10:50; 12:00-12:50
Teaching Schedule
SPRING 2012- 3220/101 MWF 8:00-8:50 CU131
- 2710/102 MWF 9:00-9:50 CU131
- 2710/104 MWF 11:00-11:50 DS365
Research Interests
- American and International Modernism
- Jazz, Folk and Poplula Music
- Vaudeville and the Labor Stage
- Critical Intellectual Property Studies
- Collaborative and Networked Writing
Selected Publications
- “An Experiment in Modern Vaudeville: Archiving the Wretched Refuse in John Howard Lawson’s Processional.” Modern Drama 51.4 (Winter 2008): 528-555.
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black-and-White Photograph.” In Writing the Visual: A Practical Guide for Teachers of Composition and Communication. Ed. Carol David and Anne R. Richards. West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press, 2008. 201-220.
- Early Jazz Literature (And Why You Didn’t Know).” American Literary History 16.4 (Winter 2004): 648-674.
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“Jazz Language and Ethnic Novelty.” Modernism/Modernity 10.2 (April 2003): 239-268.
Honors/Awards
English Department
