My primary area of academic specialization is early American print culture, although I also have strong interests in Thoreau, Twain, Hemingway, and various contemporary writers. I also have secondary interests in popular literature, specifically crime fiction, and genre theory. In my research I am primarily focused on the half century from 1770 to 1820. While I teach and study a wide range of canonical authors, such as Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin, I work closely with non-canonical writers of life histories. I am especially interested in popular narrative forms, particularly in criminal narratives, shipwreck narratives, and captivity narratives. With backgrounds in History of the Book Studies, reader-response theory, and Bakhtin, I am concerned with strategies of narrative self-presentation and how texts function in their cultural contexts. In my publications I have offered critical analyses of how writers used the act of publication in order to reconstruct themselves in the public sphere.

I teach both literary history and writing. In the past I have often taught undergraduate surveys of American literature from beginnings to the Civil War and more specialized seminars in major writers and genres (autobiography, short story, and poetry). I also teach both basic and advanced writing courses and upper level writing seminars in autobiography and creative non-fiction. I enjoy teaching an assortment of courses at different levels and in different subjects and am willing to contribute wherever I am needed in the undergraduate and graduate curriculums. In addition to classroom instruction, I serve as an advisor and mentor to both undergraduate and graduate students and as a member on several graduate degree committees.

As Chair of the TCU English Department, I have a number of service-related duties and responsibilities. With the help of my colleagues, my role is to direct, supervise, and administer all departmental programs and functions. In addition to work within the Department, I am currently co-chair of the TCU writing-across-the-curriculum initiative and serve on the ad hoc AddRan post-tenure review committee.

Early American Print Culture, Theory and Practice of Narrative and Autobiography

American Literature to Reconstruction, Contemporary Literature, Composition and Creative Writing.

Issues of authorship and self-presentation during the early republic, popular culture and cultural studies, textual depictions of captivity and liberty.