Associate Professor of English
Ph.D., Indiana University
7a Sanborn House
Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Interests
I specialize in nineteenth-century American and African American literature and culture with a focus on race representation, mixed race identity, and the interrelationship of literature and visual culture. Other research and teaching interests include graphic novels, autobiography, and critical race studies of historical and contemporary genre fiction.
English 66 Reading Between the Color Line: 19th Century Literature of Interracial Identity
English 67 The Graphic Novel
English 43 Early Black American Literature
English 41 American Prose
African and African American Studies 10, Introduction to African American Studies
• Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, University of Wisconsin Press, 2011.
• Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative, Indiana University Press. 2009.
• "The Concatenate Poetics of Slavery and the Articulate Material of Dave the Potter." African American Review (forthcoming 2011).
• "Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography." College Literature 38.3 (2011): 21-44.
• "Animal Subjects of the Graphic Novel." College Literature 38.3 (2011): 129-149.
• "E.E. Cummings's Tom: A Ballet and Uncle Tom's Doll-Dance of Modernism." Journal of Modern Literature 34.2 (2011): 22-44.
• "'Heartfelt Thanks to Punch for the Picture': Frederick Douglass and the Transnational Jokework of Slave Caricature." American Literature 82.1(2010): 57-90.
• "Is There an African American Graphic Novel?" In Approaches to Teaching the Graphic Novel. Ed. Stephen Tabachnick. New York: Modern Language Association Press, 2009. 69-75.
• “Drawing on History in Recent African American Graphic Novels.” MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. 32.3 (2007): 175-200.
• “Slave Cyborgs and the Black Infovirus: Ishmael Reed’s Cybernetic Aesthetics.” Modern Fiction Studies 49.2 (2003): 261-283.
• “Traveling Harlem’s Europe: Vagabondage from Slave Narratives to Gwendolyn Bennett’s ‘Wedding Day’ and Claude McKay’s Banjo.” Journal of Narrative Theory 32.1 (2002): 52-76.