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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.
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