English

EDUCATION:
B.A., English, UC Berkeley 1999
Ph.D., English, Duke, 2005

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: American Literature, Law and Literature, Historicism and the Critique of Power

I teach courses in American literature and culture, ranging from the antebellum period through the twentieth century. I also worked with Professor Caryl Phillips to develop “The Literature of the Middle Passage,” a senior seminar on literature and the Atlantic slave trade that included a ten-day trip to Ghana in the fall of 2007. My research concerns literary, philosophical, and political works, with special attention to the representation of legal and extralegal violence. My book, The Prison and the American Imagination (forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2009) explores how the U.S. prison system, founded in the early nineteenth century, enshrined the ideal of resurrection through penitence—and presumed the power to condemn its inmates to a living death. On leave and a Whitney Humanities Center fellowship in 2008-09, I’m beginning two new projects: one on the question of interrogation, another called “The American Curse,” about how printed texts represent the ritualized speech acts of law and religion. What connects these several inquiries, I think, is an abiding interest in how an American society identified with secularism and human rights continues to imagine powerful forms of mysticism and inhumanity.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Prison and the American Imagination, Yale University Press (forthcoming in 2009)

--"Emerson and Incarceration." American Literature (June 2006)

-"Bodies Electric: Gender, Technology, and the Limits of the Human, circa 1900" Mosaic (June 2008)

--"Detention without Subjects: Prisons and the Poetics of Living Death."
In Detention: Special Issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, ed. Phil Barrish (September 2008).

UNDERGRADUATE COURSES: William Faulkner; The Literature of the Middle Passage; Early American Literature: Savages, Witches, Prisoners, Slaves; American Literature and the History of Punishment; Introduction to American Litearture