WELCOME

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To welcome you to my page, I've included several pictures. To the left is a picture I took of one of my favorite places, Montezuma's Castle in Arizona, along with a visual representation of me created with the Makowka Character Maker II. My homepage background is taken from a picture I took of native grass over a frozen swamp in Guilford, Connecticut.

 

To learn more about me, here is a brief narrative of my time in and just after graduate school, and here is a very abridged commentary in which I discuss race and racism as it affected my experiences of the world growing up. I suppose I don't share many personal things publicly, though this essay I wrote in 2019 pretty much encapsulates my feelings on quite a few things. You can follow me on Twitter, too.

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 RESEARCH & WRITING

 

My current book project, which is coming out in 2025 with Stanford University Press, focuses on literary and musical representations of migrants in the United States, from the 1930s into the 1980s. By exploring the historical and political ramifications of migration in twentieth century American literatures, I construct a narrative history and analysis of representational experiments that seek to manifest direct democracy within their texts--and the many different aesthetic modes authors and musicians used to achieve this formal unity of politics and aesthetics. The authors and singers I research seek to undo the power of the author (and by extension seek to divest their texts from alienated and alienating modes and methods of representation) by experimenting with novel ways of incorporating other voices, a process that I call "speaking with." These works move and flow in unexpected and imaginatively powerful ways that create new ethical praxes for engaging in and understanding textual (re)presentation.

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I also do work on desert spaces, particularly the Sonoran Desert, and I'm part of the Desert Futures Collective.

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With editor-in-chief Gloria Fisk, and editors Michael Docherty and Tyler Tennant, I am also a co-editor of Post45: Contemporaries.

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Main Research Fields: African American Literature, Chicana/o/x Literature, American Literature, Postcolonial Literature.

 

 TEACHING & INTERESTS

 

I have taught a variety of classes, on topics including American Literatures (especially in African American and Latinx Literature, as well as multiple iterations of American Literature surveys), Migration, Queer Literature and Film, American Popular Film, Literature and Ethics, Literary Criticism, Toni Morrison, and Composition. I have given talks on African American Literature, Chicana/o Literature, American Literatures, Southwestern Literature, Contemporary Literature, Film, Folk Music, and Jazz. In terms of my teaching and research interests, I engage heavily with American Literatures, African American Literature, Chicana/o/x Literature, Southwestern Literature, and LGBTQ* Literature.