Professor
My research interests focus on American literature, modernist studies, literary theory, and literature of the US South, with special attention to Faulkner. I’ve written several books on Faulkner, including The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Cornell UP, 1982), which took a post-structuralist approach to his work, and William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), a study of Faulkner’s imagining of Southern place—regional, hemispheric, and global—as a coherent, if shifting project over the course of his career. I continue to teach and write on Faulkner, with two edited volumes for Cambridge UP appearing in 2015 (William Faulkner in Context and The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner.
My most recent book examines the ways some prominent works of U.S. fiction represent the disavowal of national reliance on the racial capitalism of plantation economies. Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris deals with nineteenth century writers, primarily Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris, who reveal the habits of imagination that enabled the denial of forms of exploitation on which national prosperity was founded. In essays on Willa Cather and Cormac McCarthy I take up instances of the ways later US fiction confronts cultural modes of disavowal in the post-plantation South. I’ve continued this line of inquiry in a recent piece on racial mourning in Faulkner and Jesmyn Ward.
The historical side of my research has led to regular interdisciplinary team-teaching with Prof. Nina Silber of Boston University’s Department of History. We have taught undergraduate courses in Southern literature and modern American culture between the world wars, a graduate seminar in the US South in global context, and a first-year undergraduate seminar in the Kilachand Honors College on the historical contexts for representations of racial conflict in contemporary America.
I regularly teach courses in the modern American novel, Southern literature, literary theory, and modernist studies.
Selected Publications
Books
Hidden in Plain Sight: Slave Capitalism in Poe, Hawthorne, and Joel Chandler Harris The Lamar Memorial Lectures (U Georgia P, 2020)
- The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, Editor (Cambridge UP, 2015)
- William Faulkner in Context, Editor (Cambridge UP, 2015)
- William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
- A Companion to the Modern American Novel, Editor (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
- The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (Twayne, 1990)
- The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Cornell UP, 1982)
Articles
“Slave Capitalism in Faulkner,” in Faulkner and Slavery (U P Mississippi, forthcoming)
“Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction,” in The Cambridge History of the Literature of the US South, ed. Harilaos Stecopoulos (Cambridge UP, forthcoming)
- “The Moveable South: Plantation Memory in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road,” in Unsteadily Marching On: The U.S. South in Motion (2013)
- “Willa Cather and the Burden of Southern History,” Philological Quarterly (2011)
- “Many Mansions: Faulkner’s Cold War Conflicts,” in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2006 (U Mississippi P, 2009)
- “Globalizing the U.S. South: Modernity and Modernism,” American Literature (2006)
- “American Writing of the Great War,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (Cambridge UP, 2005)
- “Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back,” American Literary History (2004)
- “This Race Which Is Not One: The More Inextricable Compositeness of Faulkner’s South,” in Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (2004)
- “Touching Race in Go Down, Moses,” in New Essays on Go Down, Moses (1996)
- “Faulkner and the Culture Industry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Faulkner (1994)
- “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age,” Boundary 2 (1992)
- “Shortened Stories: Faulkner and the Market,” in Faulkner and the Short Story (1992)
- “Intertextual Frameworks: The Ideology of Parody in John Barth,” in Essays on Intertextuality and Contemporary American Literature (1989)
- “Framing in Wuthering Heights,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language (1985)
- “The Elliptical Nature of Sanctuary,” Novel (1984)
Honors, Grants, and Awards
- NEH Senior Research Fellowship (1984–85, 1995–96)
- Boston University Henderson Senior Research Fellowship (2006-7, 2014-15)
- Fulbright Lectureship in American Studies, Charles University, Czech Republic (2010-11)
- Boston University Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching (2006)
- Founding Co-Editor, The Faulkner Journal (1986-present)
- President, The Faulkner Society (2006–2009)
- President, Society for the Study of Southern Literature (2014-2016)
- Lamar Memorial Lectures in Southern Studies, Mercer University (2016)