Keith Wilhite, Ph.D.

     Keith Wilhite, Ph.D.
     214 Kiernan Hall
     518-783-4218
     Email

    Curriculum Vitae

Keith Wilhite joined the English Faculty at Siena College in Fall 2011.  He recieved an M.A. in English from Saint Louis University (2000) and a Ph.D. in English from The University of Iowa (2007).  From 2007-2011, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University. His research primarily focuses on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, and his scholarship draws broadly on the fields of urban studies, sociology, U.S. history, critical regionalism, and narrative theory.  He has published articles on Richard Wright's Black Boy (in Prose Studies), Walt Whitman's early notebooks and poetry (in ELH), John Cheever's Shady Hill stories (in Studies in American Fiction), Willa Cather's My Ántonia (in Studies in the Novel), Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (in Arizona Quarterly), and the suburbs as a new "national region" in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Chang-rae Lee's Aloft (in American Literature).  Most of these projects share a common goal: to explore literary texts as aesthetic forms that produce a certain kind of engagement with the places and practices of everyday life.  He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Contested Terrain: Suburbia, US Literature, and the Ends of Regionalism.