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M 03:30 PM-05:00 PM
W 10:00 AM-12:00 PM,03:30 PM-05:00 PM

I joined the English Faculty at Siena College in Fall 2011. I received my M.A. in English from Saint Louis University (2000) and my Ph.D. in English from The University of Iowa (2007). From 2007-2011, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Thompson Writing Program at Duke University.

Degree Program University
Ph.D. English University of Iowa
M.A. English St. Louis University
B.A. English St. Louis University

My Siena Experience

My Teaching Philosophy

My classes foreground multiple acts of interpretation: interpretations of the texts we read, our expectations as readers, and the diverse contexts and perspectives that arise in relation to those texts.  I encourage students to study literary works, to identify and explore points of interest and complexity in those texts, and most importantly, to defend their ideas and positions through evidence and analysis. My primary goal is to create opportunities for students to find their voices as critical thinkers and intellectual writers and, along the way, foster an understanding that writing is a mode of critical thought that leads us to further insights and new perspectives.


What I Love About Siena

The best part of teaching at Siena is the opportunity to work with students across multiple courses and in multiple different learning environments: the classroom, advising sessions, independent studies, and Honors theses. It's rewarding to see students mature as individuals and scholars over the arc of their academic careers. Through their essays and our classroom discussions, I gain valuable insight into how they understand the significance of the written word and how literary texts connect them to the broader world of culture, politics, ethics, and social relations.  

My Favorite Courses to Teach

My Professional Experience

Year Title Organization
2023 - Now Professor of English Siena College
2015 - 2023 Associate Professor of English Siena College
2011 - 2015 Assistant Professor of English Siena College
2007 - 2011 Postdoctoral Fellow, Thompson Writing Program Duke University

Current Research

My research primarily focuses on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, and my scholarship draws broadly on the fields of urban studies, sociology, U.S. history, critical regionalism, and narrative theory. I have published articles on Richard Wright's Black Boy (Prose Studies), Walt Whitman's early notebooks and poetry (ELH), John Cheever's Shady Hill stories (Studies in American Fiction), Willa Cather's My Ántonia (Studies in the Novel), Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go (Arizona Quarterly), Jhumpa Lahiri's short stories (MELUS), and the suburbs as a new "national region" in Jeffrey Eugenides's The Virgin Suicides (MFS), 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. Recently, this research has culminated in the publication of my book, Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and US Regionalism, 1945–2020 (University of Iowa Press, 2022).


Articles & Book Reviews

  • One House at a Time: Democratic Citizenship and Domestic Security in Clybourne Park
    MidAmerica, vol. 47
    2020
  • Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader
    Nabokov Studies, vol. 13
    2014
  • Contested Terrain: The Suburbs as Region
    American Literature, vol. 84
    September, 2012
  • A Yearning for a Kind of Consciousness: Black Boy and the Aesthetic Solution
    Prose Studies, vol. 22
    April, 1999
  • Blank Spaces: Outdated Maps and Unsettled Subjects in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies
    MELUS: Mult-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., vol. 41
    Summer, 2016
  • Face the House: Suburban Domesticity and Nation as Home in The Virgin Suicides
    Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61
    Spring, 2015
  • Girls Gone Wrong: Whiteness and the Economy of Desire
    Midwestern Miscellany, vol. 41
    Spring, 2013
  • His Mind Was Full of Absences: Whitman at the Scene of Writing
    ELH, vol. 71
    Winter, 2004
  • John Cheever's Shady Hill, Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Suburbs
    Studies in American Fiction, vol. 34
    Fall, 2006
  • Mapping Black and Brown L.A.: Zoot Suit Riots as Spatial Subtext in If He Hollers Let Him Go
    Arizona Quarterly, vol. 66
    Summer, 2010
  • Unsettled Worlds: Aesthetic Emplacement in Willa Cather's My Ántonia
    Studies in the Novel, vol. 42
    Fall, 2010

Books & Book Chapters

  • Contested Terrain: Suburban Fiction and U.S. Regionalism, 1945–2020
    University of Iowa Press
    2022
  • American Literature in Transition, 1950-1960
    Cambridge University Press
    2018
  • The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies
    Oxford Universtiy Press
    2017
  • The City since 9/11: Literature, Film, Television (edited collection)
    Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
    2016

Presentations

  • It Happens One House at a Time: From Race Pioneers to "Post-Racial" Gentrification
    May, 2020
    Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Chicago, Illinois
  • Private Eyes: Mapping the Megalopolis in Thomas Pynchon's California.
    June, 2019
    International Pynchon Week, Rome, Italy
  • Serious Fictions: Neoliberalism, Literary Value, and Suburban Culture
    November, 2017
    Suburbia: An Archaeology of the Moment, Toulouse, France
  • Literature and Community-Engaged Learning: A Faculty-Undergraduate Collaboration.
    May, 2017
    Engage for Change: Engaging Diverse Communities, Loudonville, New York
  • Bringing the 'Burbs to Harlem: Home Building in Ann Petry's The Street
    2017
    Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Louisville, Kentucky
  • Domestic Unrest: Immigrant Families and the Housing Crisis in Jung Yun's Shelter
    2017
    Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the U.S. conference, Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • The End of Private Property: Fallen Land and the Perils of Home Ownership
    May, 2014
    American Literature Association, Washington, District of Columbia
  • Imagining a Community of Readers in the Era of Suburban Sprawl
    June, 2013
    The Cultures of the Suburbs International Research Network, Second Symposium, Hempstead, New York
  • History Against the Grain: Teju Cole's Open City
    March, 2013
    NEMLA, Boston, Massachusetts
  • The Suburbs in Popular Culture, or: How did we get from Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best to Desperate Housewives and Family Guy
    November, 2012
    Chapman Historical Museum, Glens Falls, New York
  • Unsettling Subjects: Amateur Cartography in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies
    November, 2011
    MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), St. Louis, Missouri
  • Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader
    January, 2011
    MLA, Los Angeles, California
  • The Emerging Global City in Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People
    January, 2011
    MLA, Los Angeles, California
  • Moving Out: Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and the Future of Suburbia
    April, 2010
    NEMLA, Montreal, Canada-Quebec
  • Lolita and the Science of Sex
    February, 2009
    NEMLA, Boston, Massachusetts
  • The Trouble with Midwestern Roots: Jonathan Franzen's Oprah Problem
    November, 2008
    MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), Minneapolis, Minnesota
  • Framing the Suburbs: Destabilizing America's Insular Geographies
    October, 2007
    American Studies Association, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
  • Pornography Begins at Home: Erotic Fantasy and Domestic Abuse in Paula Vogel's Hot 'N' Throbbing
    November, 2005
    MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), Milwaukee, Wisconsin
  • A Midwestern Postmortem: Jeffrey Eugenides's Suburban Suicides
    May, 2005
    SSML (Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature), East Lansing, Michigan
  • Real-Estate Terrorism in Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City
    November, 2004
    MMLA (Midwestern Modern Language Association), St. Louis, Missouri
  • Racial Trespassing: Representations of Suburbia in Ann Petry's The Street
    March, 2004
    James F. Jakobsen Graduate Forum (University of Iowa), Iowa City, Iowa
  • A Promissory Space: Jean Toomer's Cane and the "Soft Circle" of Aesthetics
    April, 2003
    Mid-America American Studies Association, Iowa City, Iowa
  • The Woman With(out) a Past: Desiring Subjects and Objects of Desire in The House of Mirth
    March, 2001
    NEMLA, Hartford, Connecticut
  • "I had two dreams": O'Neill and the Duality of Inwardness
    February, 2001
    Twentieth-Century Literature Conference, Louisville, Kentucky