Both my teaching and my research are focused primarily on American Literature. I have taught a number of American literature courses at Ohio University and other institutions. For a complete list of my past courses, see my vita. Here are the courses I am scheduled to teach in the 2026-2027 academic year:
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ENG 2540: American Literature II: 1865 to Present (Spring 2027)
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ENG 3070J: Research and Writing in English Studies (Fall 2026)
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ENG 4600: Senior Seminar: Ohio in the American Literary Imagination (Spring 2027)
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ENG 6300 / 7300: Graduate Seminar on the American Gothic (Fall 2026)
The bulk of my academic writing has focused on the work of nineteenth-century American writers, but I've also written about twentieth-century and contemporary writers. Authors who have been the subject of my work include both well-known and obscure writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Herman Melville, John Greenleaf Whittier, Grace Greenwood, William Gilmore Simms, Evelyn Scott, Anne Tyler, Ellen Glasgow, Michael Cunningham, and Ellen Gilchrist.
My most recent book, Poe, Queerness, and the End of Time, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in the summer of 2022 and was recently awarded the 2022 Patrick F. Quinn Award for outstanding monograph published on Poe by the Poe Studies Association.
My first book, Unwelcome Voices: Subversive Fiction in the Antebellum South, was published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2005 and was awarded the Nancy Dasher Award by the College English Association of Ohio. My second book, Against the Gallows: Antebellum American Writers and the Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment, was published by the University of Iowa Press in 2011.
You can also see my vita for a complete list of my publications, presentations, and professional activities.
I was interviewed for the public radio program (podcast) BackStory with the American History Guys about Edgar Allan Poe's fiction for an episode entitled "American Horror Story."
You can hear that episode here.
