English

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

Printable C.V.

INTERESTS: Interests: American Literature, Law and Literature, Historicism, Prison Studies, 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 examines documents of American culture with special attention to the relations between legal institutions and social imaginaries. I am interested in how literary texts of various genres have involved themselves with such problems as punishment, secular justice, human rights, and legal personhood. My book, The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009), explores the development of the U.S. penal system in legal and cultural history, with special attention to the inmate’s figurative passage from civil death to a secular rebirth. I’m now at work on a second book project, provisionally called “The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice, 1765-1865,” about the public culture of justice in the revolutionary and antebellum periods. A study of legal, religious, and literary texts in which speakers invoke a higher law as the origin of their authority, it argues that such invocations enacted new ways of summoning the legitimating sanction of the public in the era of print and popular sovereignty.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

--The Prison and the American Imagination, Yale University Press (September 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 Literature

GRADUATE COURSE: Antebellum American Literature and Culture