This essay explores the challenge to the chivalric myth of the aviator in Willa Cather’s One of Ours and William Faulkner’s Soldier’s Pay. Revived during the First World War, this romantic myth cloaked the aviator in idealism and hid the actual body of the flyer in rhetoric. In this war of increasing mechanization, the air war was the last basti…[Read more]

On 12 July 1776, Captain James Cook and his crew left England in search of the famed
Northwest Passage. Spanish, French, and Russian explorers before him had set out to
find this Arctic waterway, which was thought to link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans
and promised to open up a new, more direct trading route with Asia. After seven
months…[Read more]

This essay brings together two texts, a letter to the editor written in experimental prose by the Black avant-garde Beat poet, Bob Kaufman, and “The Unlocking,” a spoken-word poem written and performed by Ursula Rucker that appears at the end of The Roots’ critically acclaimed rap album, Do You Want More??!?. By using the aural to disrupt expec…[Read more]

This guide details each phase of creating Histories of the NationalMall, mallhistory.org, including planning, interpretative approach, user experience and design, testing, and outreach efforts of the project team. Histories of the National Mall is a digital public history project developed by the RoyRosenzweig Center for History and New Media at…[Read more]

This essay takes a long view of Wright’s work, arguing that his racial consciousness always extended beyond national boundaries and was forged from a globalist perspective. This outlook is not, as some critics have maintained, a late-stage development in Wright’s career, but rather the predominant theme that unites his oeuvre with a single con…[Read more]

This is the submission (unedited) version of the article published in Times Higher Education on April 11, 2019, which argues that the market-based competition that fuels so much of academic life is doing us all far more harm than good.

My Ph.D. examination bibliography in the fields of Contemporary Southern Literature and Contemporary Book History and Print Culture

Black artists have created, modified, or otherwise treated the book as an object of aesthetic expression since at least the nineteenth century. African American artists’ production and circulation of friendship albums and scrapbooks, democratic multiples and artist publishing, accordion folds, enclosures, and fine printing editions, all work to…[Read more]

Slides from Renata Kobetts Miller’s (City College of New York) presentation as part of the panel on “The Problems and Possibilities of Parenting in the Academy.”

This essay examines the relationship between modernist formal experimentation and rehabilitative futurism, the modern cultural fantasy of a hygienic future in which all illness and disability have been eradicated. Through a reading of Kenneth Burke’s early essay collection Counter-Statement (1931) and his first and only novel, Towards a Better…[Read more]

Explores Douglas Coupland’s “Generation X” as almost a Gen Xer’s “version of John Updike’s Couples”; that is, as, a place where, like Updike’s book, friends create a community isolated only to themselves. Though unlike Updike’s work, where — considering the time it was written in, the ’70s, where a generation succeeded in overtly contesting and…[Read more]

Explores how Max Vigne, from Andrea Barrett’s “Servants of the Map,” makes use of the dangerous Himalayan mountain environment as almost as Winnicottian “play space,” in which to recover from being requited to a life of obligation, rather than real-self discovery, after his mother’s death.

This presentation addresses the opportunities and challenges of transacting digital humanities collaborative projects from the perspective of a Digital Humanities Research Designer in an academic library. While collaboration is often celebrated as a central to the success of digital humanities projects, I argue that often the language of…[Read more]

Explores the invisible man, in Ralph Ellison’s “The Invisible Man,” as borrowing upon associations of patriarchal maleness, in the sense Ann Douglas in her “Terrible Honesty” argues 20s modern’s did, to secure freedom from feelings of entrapment by maternal figures, whose near-proximity to him is expressed in the text as often incestuous, gross;…[Read more]

A review of Stanley Kunitz’s poetry, emphasizing how he used his poetry to both explore and manage his relationship with his dominating mother. Argues that none of Kunitz’s elegies work as conventional elegies, or as we traditionally understand or expect them to work, but more as working their way to the direction Peter Sacks advocates, as…[Read more]

Explores how Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” encourages, more than identification with, but an impressing oneself within “the kid,” and makes all of his adventures with Glanton and his outriders a ride we thrill at, even if at times very much secretly — as with the slaughter of the indigenous camp. Glanton is a phallic “hero” for us; it is the…[Read more]