English

EDUCATION:
Ph.D., English and American Literature, Johns Hopkins University, 1999
M.A. Poetry, The Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University, 1993
B.A./M.A., Political Science and Humanities, with Honors in the Humanities, 1992

Printable C.V. | Personal Web Site

INTERESTS: twentieth century American literature, contemporary fiction, history of criticism and theory, religion and literature; twentieth-century publishing industry

My research and teaching focuses on twentieth-century American literature, especially the period since 1945. I bring together fiction, poetry, criticism, theory and cultural history in unexpected ways around topics such as genocide and religion. I am interested in literary form and literary history, and often include archival materials in my teaching. In editorial work (currently for Yale Studies in English) and as a founder of the Postmodernist Studies Association, a new professional association for scholars working in post-45 literary studies, I enjoy brining the work of others to larger publics. On NPR’s Weekend America, I have the chance to discuss current events from a literary perspective. Books in progress: The Cambridge Introduction to the American Novel, 1945 to 2000 and Postmodern Belief: American Literature and Religion Since 1960.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personfication ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003)

--“Don DeLillo’s Latin Mass,” Contemporary Literature 47.3 (Fall, 2006)

--“Postmodern Supernaturalism: Ginsberg and the Search for a Supernatural Language,” in “Contercultural Capital,” edited by Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism 18.2 (Fall, 2005): 269-98

--“Memorizing Memory,” in the “Interpretation and the Holocaust,” a special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (Spring, 2001):67-92

--“Surviving Rego Park: Holocaust Theory from Art Spiegelman to Berel Lang,” in The Americanization of the Holocaust , ed. Hilene Flanzbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 102-24

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Literature Now; Four American Writers Since 1940; American Literature Since 1945 (lecture course); Introduction to the Study of American Literature; Holocaust and Literature, 1950 to the Present; Introduction to Literary Study; What Haunts America?

GRADUATE COURSES: Postmodern Fiction, Postmodern Theory; Post-1945 American Fiction