My academic research focuses on 20th and 21st century U.S. literature and culture.  Primarily I write about the modern and contemporary American novel, but I have also published essays on short fiction, poetry, and autobiography, organized conference panels on the short story and American neighborhoods, and presented papers on the work of American dramatists like Paula Vogel and Eugene O’Neill. You can read my articles on the intersection of race, writing, and readership in Richard Wright’s Black Boy (Prose Studies) and in Walt Whitman’s early notebooks and poetry (published in ELH).  In the fall of 2009, I published an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education regarding the job search process for PhDs. This fall, I have an article on regionalism and aesthetic practices in Willa Cather's My Antonia due out in Studies in the Novel (vol. 42.3, 2010). Recently, I've also been focusing on Los Angeles history and fiction. My article on the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots and Chester Himes’ novel If He Hollers Let Him Go appeared in the Summer 2010 issue of Arizona Quarterly (vol. 66.2), and I will be presenting a paper on Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People and the multi-ethnic metropolis of L.A. at the MLA Convention in January 2011.  

Most of these projects share a common goal: to explore literary texts as sites where the crosscurrents of aesthetic practices, political ideologies, and cultural geography intersect.  In terms of methodology, I approach these intersections by combining close readings of literary texts with works of cultural analysis.  My research draws broadly on the fields of urban studies, sociology, U.S. history, critical regionalism, and narrative theory.  I read literary texts not merely as reflections or examples of a particular cultural moment, but as aesthetic forms that produce a certain kind of engagement with the places and practices of everyday life.

My book manuscript, Contested Terrain: Suburbia, U.S. Literature, and the Ends of Regionalism, offers a unique perspective on how the post-World War II suburban nation-building project ushered in a new, informal geography in the United States, recalibrating our notions of national security, citizenship, and personal worth to the scale of the detached, single-family home.  Moving away from scholarship that highlights the alienating and placeless quality of suburbia, I argue that we should re-imagine suburban narratives as part of a long literary tradition of regional writing that connects the isolation and exclusivity of the domestic realm to the expansionist ideologies of U.S. nationalism and imperialism.  While embodying the frontier rhetoric of an ever-expanding American empire, the suburbs have fostered the kind of domestic insularity that continues to inform debates about privacy, economic segregation, the politics of sex and gender, racial and ethnic geographies, and post-9/11 national identity. Contested Terrain reframes our accustomed reading of suburban narratives and our understanding of U.S. regional studies at the turn of the 21st century.

You can read a version of my chapter on John Cheever’s Shady Hill stories in Studies in American Fiction.  I hope to have a complete draft of the book manuscript by the fall of 2011.