EDUCATION:
Ph.D., English, University of California, Los Angeles, 2009
B.A., English, California State University, Bakersfield, 2001
INTERESTS: modernism; women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; British and American literature from the late nineteenth century through the present; ethnic American and African-American literature; histories of science and aesthetics
My research and teaching focus primarily on British and American modernist literature and sexuality studies. I’m currently interested in the questions that aesthetic and sexual feeling present for literary historiography. My first book project explores how British and American modernist writers co-opt the evolutionary precepts of degeneration theory to depict queer feeling as natural: material but nonetheless subject to change. My next book project will examine how British and American writers throughout the twentieth century use aesthetics like the mythical method and magic realism to create queer mythologies that depict the construction of transhistorical and transnational queer communities.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:
--"The Queer Jungles of Henry James’ ‘Beast,’" Queer Exoticism, ed. David Powell; under contract with Cambridge Scholars Publishing (forthcoming)
--"Making Modernism New: Queer Mythology in The Young and Evil," ELH (Winter 2009)
--"'Spectacles in Color': The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes," PMLA 124.3 (May 2009): 798-816
--“Fast Books Read Slow: The Shapes of Speed in Manhattan Transfer and The Sun Also Rises,” JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 38.3 (Fall 2008): 342-377
--“Richard Barnfield and the Limits of Homoerotic Literary History,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1 (2007): 63-91
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: Readings in American Literature, Wars I Have Read (literature seminar), Mythology and Community in Twentieth-Century Queer Literature (junior seminar), The European Literary Tradition
