Faculty & Staff Directory

EDUCATION

• Ph.D. in English, The Pennsylvania State University, May 2008
• M.A. in English, The Pennsylvania State University, May 2002
• B.A. in English and Philosophy, Miami University (OH), magna cum laude, May 1997

TEACHING

American Literature
Contemporary Literature
Literary Criticism and Theory
Literature of the Environment
Composition

RESEARCH

• 20th and 21st century American Literature (William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, David Foster Wallace)
• Narrative Theory
• Cognitive Literary Studies

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• “Embodied Reading and Narrative Empathy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.” Studies in the Novel 47.4 (2015)
• “Dreaming the Border Trilogy: Cormac McCarthy and Narrative Creativity.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal 13.1 (2015)
• “Reading Visions and Visionary Reading in Blood Meridian.” Southwestern American Literature 36.3 (2011).  
• “The Modern Magnetic Animal: As I Lay Dying and the Uncanny Zoology of Modernism.” Journal of Modern Literature 31.3 (2008).

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

• “Kinaesthetic Reading and Infinite Jest.” American Literature Association, 30^th Annual Conference. Boston, MA. May 23-26, 2019.
• “Thinking with David Foster Wallace: A Cognitive Reading of ‘Mister Squishy.’” Annual International Conference on Narrative. Montreal, Quebec, Canada. April 19-22, 2018.
• “Infinite Jest and the Embodied Reader.” American Literature Association: 28^th Annual Conference on American Literature. Boston, MA. May 25-28, 2017
• “Marilynne Robinson’s Poetics of Estrangement: The Case of Jack Boughton.” Southeast Conference on Christianity and Literature. Charleston, SC. April 9-11, 2015
• “Re-Enchanting Doomed Enterprises: Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing as Ritualized Space.” American Literature Association Symposium: “Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, and Their Traditions,” in New Orleans, LA.  October 2012 
• “An Uncanny Ecology: Animal Worlds and Human Dwelling in Cormac McCarthy.”  The Cormac McCarthy Society 2011 Symposium on the Southwestern Novels, Austin, TX.  November 2011
• “Reading Visions, Visionary Reading: The Gothic Optics of Blood Meridian.”  The Cormac McCarthy Society Annual Conference, in San Marcos, TX.  October 2010
• “Postsecular Ecology in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.” American Literature Association Symposium on American Fiction 1890 to the Present, in Savannah, GA. October 2010