Office: Radford 308
Although the primary focus of my teaching and scholarship is American literature from the colonial era through World War II, with emphasis on the nineteenth century, my teaching is wide-ranging in subject matter and interdisciplinary in nature. In addition to a seminar on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, I have designed and taught courses on the Fictions of Whiteness, Terror, Cultural Canons, the American Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Great Depression. I have published on several Reconstruction-era novels, literary depictions of African American Civil War soldiers, Surrealism and gender identity in the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and the works of such authors as Paule Marshall, Kate Chopin, Rebecca Harding Davis, John William De Forest, Stephen Crane, and Ann Petry.
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Frederick Douglass
- Moby-Dick; or The Whale, Herman Melville
- The Street, Ann Petry
- Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
- PhD, Temple University, American Literature
- MA, Temple University, English
- BA, Virginia Commonwealth University, magna cum laude in English
- Literature and History: The Great Depression
- Graduate Seminar in Literature: Fictions of Whiteness
- African American Literature
- Honors African American Literature
- Major Figures in American Fiction: The American Slave
- Modern American Novel: The Great Depression
- Survey of American Literature I: Exploration to 1865
- The Rhetoric of Literature: Rewriting/Reconstructing America
- Border Crossings: Graduate Seminar in American Ethnic Women Writers
- American Realism and Naturalism
- American Poetry: Whitman to Present
- Survey of American Literature II: 1865 to Present
- Introduction to American Literature and Culture
- Senior Seminar in English Studies: Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
- Senior Seminar in English Studies: Recovering Literary Dialogues
- Senior Seminar in English Studies: Canons and Cultural Contexts
- Introduction to English Studies
- Honors Senior Seminar: Terror
- Honors First-Year Seminar: Reconstruction: To Build Anew
- Honors 275: Culture Connection
- The American Antislavery Movement
- Honors Composition (2006-2010, four sections)
- Writing-Based Inquiry Seminar, The American Civil War: Experience, Myth, and Memory
- Honors Introduction to Literature and Composition
- Research and Critical Thinking, Special Topic: Banned Books
- College Composition: Studies in Race and Ethnicity
- Writing for Business and Industry
- College Composition
- Research and Critical Thinking
- Introduction to Academic Discourse
- Introduction to World Literature
Selected Publications and/or Activities:
- “‘You Make Such an Exquisite Corpse’: Surrealist Collaboration and the Transcendence of Gender in Hedwig and the Angry Inch.” The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game. Ed. Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren, Davis Schneiderman, and Tom Denlinger. U of Nebraska P, 2009. 257-77.
- “‘It Could Have Been Any Street’: Ann Petry, Stephen Crane, and the Fate of Naturalism.” Reading America: New Perspectives on the American Novel. Ed. Anne-Marie Evans and Elizabeth Boyle. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. 26-46.
- “Romances of Reconstruction: The Postwar Marriage Plot in Rebecca Harding Davis and John William De Forest.” Back to Peace: Reconciliation and Retribution in the Postwar Period. Ed. Aránzazu Usandizaga and Andrew Monnickendam. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 2007. 146-59.
- “‘It Could Have Been Any Street’: Ann Petry, Stephen Crane, and the Fate of Naturalism.” Studies in American Fiction (Spring 2006): 87-106.
- “‘The Whole Drama of the War’: The African American Soldier in Civil War Literature.” PMLA (Oct. 2000): 1113-17.
- “Women Can Walk on Water: Island, Myth, and Community in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” Women’s Studies 22 (1993): 197-216.