• I specialize in twentieth- and twenty-first century American, British, and Irish literatures with emphases on technology, utopia studies, and animal studies. I’ve published four monographs — Doing Animal Studies with Androids, Aliens, and Ghosts: Defamiliarizing Human-Nonhuman Animal Relationships in FictionHope, Form, and Future in the Work of James Joyce, Hope and Wish Image in Music Technology, and Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century — as well as numerous articles on topics such as nonhuman animals, social class, technology, and hope, in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Critique, and Twentieth-Century Literature. Some of my articles are accessible through Trinity University's Digital Commons. I have lectured at the James Joyce Summer School in Dublin, Ireland, and at Trinity I have served on committees such as Promotion and Tenure, University Senate, and the UCC. I teach First-Year Experience, British Literature: French Revolution to the Present, The Literary Imagination, Literary Methods, and seminars including Realism to Postmodernism and Beyond, Experimental Fiction, What Is Modernism?, Women and Modernism, Gertrude Stein & Company, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Toni Morrison’s America, Animal Studies and Modern Fiction, and Animal Intersections.


    Writers considered in my published or in-progress work include Theodor W. Adorno, Agustina Bazterrica, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Octavia E. Butler, J.M. Coetzee, Jacques Derrida, Philip K. Dick, John Dos Passos, Marian Engel, Louise Erdrich, William Gaddis, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, George Saunders, Gertrude Stein, Jeff VanderMeer, David Foster Wallace, Jeanette Winterson, and Virginia Woolf. I’ve also written about Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin project and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea.
     

    • Ph.D., Cornell University
    • M.A., Cornell University
    • M.A., The University of Texas-Austin
    • B.A., American University

    Books

     

    Peer-Reviewed Articles & Book Chapters

    • “Nonhuman Animals and Hope: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Modern Fiction Studies (2022). (forthcoming)
    • “Hope, Hunger, and Spiritual Liberation in Joyce’s Dubliners.” James Joyce Quarterly 59.1 (Fall 2021): 53-73.
    • “The Future of Joyce’s Portrait: The Künstlerroman and Hope.” Dublin James Joyce Journal 9 (2016): 47-67.
    • “Storytelling and Alienated Labor: Joyce, Benjamin, and the Narrative Wording Class.” Journal of Modern Literature 38.2 (Winter 2015): 29-44.
    • “The Music of Wish Images: Walter Benjamin, Filesharing, and Utopia.” Journal of Popular Music Studies 26.2 (June 2014): 321-45.
    • “Like the Odyssey, Only Different: Olympian Omnipotence versus Karmic Adjustment in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 55.1 (2014): 17-32.
    • “David Foster Wallace and Lovelessness.” Twentieth-Century Literature 59.4 (Winter 2013): 575-95.
    • “George Saunders and the Postmodern Working Class.” Contemporary Literature 53.3 (Fall 2012): 437-60.
    • “The Perverse in Historical Perception: Anne Frank and Neutral Milk Hotel in the Aeroplane over the Sea.” Resounding Pasts: Essays on Literature, Popular Music, and Cultural Memory. Ed. Dragoslav Momcilovic. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 311-31.
    • “The Cat’s Meow: Ulysses, Animals, and the Veterinary Gaze.” James Joyce Quarterly 46.3-4 (Spring-Summer 2009): 529-43.
    • “Reading Gravity’s Rainbow After September Eleventh: An Anecdotal Approach.” Postmodern Culture 13.1 (September 2002). Web.

     

    • Twentieth-Century Fiction
    • Modernism
    • Media Studies
    • Animal Studies
    • Hope and Utopia Studies