Visiting Assistant Professor
I study contemporary American fiction, particularly literature dealing with warfare. My research investigates the ways Americans write about war, the ways a civilian readership appropriates and incorporates these stories, and how traumatic narratives help refashion national narratives and national identity. My work looks at Vietnam war authors who specifically subvert audience expectations of endings and catharsis, in order to call into question the ways readers use war stories and to pass a sense of the traumatic onto the reader. I am invested in how traumas such as war not only destabilize individual and communal identities, but how these traumas in turn help lay the groundwork for new, more inclusive communities (and nationhood) coping with loss.
I am currently beginning to study more recent war literature and film, with a particular eye to both its debt to Vietnam-era literature and the ways it creates new paradigms for understanding. Looking at texts such as Generation Kill, Jarhead, and Three Kings, this project will investigate how the forces of transnationalism and globalization have fundamentally altered the ways soldiers understand warfare; American soldiers in a seemingly alien desert order pizza, liberate caches of CD players and computers, drive humvees up superhighways past cars that wouldn't be out of place back home, and capture office buildings that could have been lifted directly out of Manhattan or Chicago. My work will consider the ways these uncanny similarities to the home front challenge the sense of the enemy as "Other," and consequently rethink the soldier's own identity within the combat zone.
I have also studied a wide range of composition theory, particularly through my work as a writing center instructor and administrator, and my classes emphasize the role of audience in the writing process. Students should expect a focus on writing and revision as a process both communal and ongoing, recognizing how writing is not merely an end product, but the best way to figure out your own ideas and actively participate in a dialogue with your peers.
Teaching Fields
- American Literature
- Contemporary Literature
- Composition and Rhetoric
Office Hours
SPRING 2012
- MWF 2:30-3:30
Teaching Schedule
SPRING 2012
- 2730/101 MWF 11:00-11:50 WW212
- 2730/102 MWF 12:00-12:50 WW212
- 4310/103 MWF 1:00-1:50 WW212
Research Interests
- 20th and 21st century American Literature
- War Literature
- Trauma Theory
- National and Transnational Identities
- Narrative Theory
Selected Publications
- "'In This Same Shamble of Strewn Bone': Gods Go Begging and the Community of Loss." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. (Forthcoming.)
English Department
