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Lecturer in Comparative Literature and American Studies; graduate degrees
from Stanford University (Ph.D 1997) and Simon Fraser University (M.A.
1986). Current work: a book project, "Utopian Ruination: American
Versions of the Destructive Character." Drawing on work by Ernst
Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Wilson Harris, these linked
essays read three 20th-century American novels (by Charles Reznikoff,
Kenneth Burke, and Nathaniel Mackey) as "destructive" re-writings
of three canonical 19th-century texts: Melville's "Bartleby, the
Scrivener," Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, and Douglass's
My Bondage and My Freedom. Another book project: enclosure of the
commons in hemispheric American culture. Courses taught: Comparative
American Literatures, Great Books, Contemporary Fiction, Literature in
Cold War Culture, The American 1920s, Policing and Prisons in American
Culture, and The American Literary Tradition. Areas of interest:
the persistent modifications of utopian, anarchist, and Marxist thought;
the development of hemispheric American Studies; literature and historiography;
the use by literary artists of the "type," as distinct from
the psychologized character. Selected publications and conference papers:
articles or book chapters on Bloch, Benjamin, Frederick Douglass, Walt
Whitman, Michael Ondaatje, and Nathaniel Mackey; conference papers on
Stephen Crane, Theodor Adorno, Kenneth Burke, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn
Brooks, Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes, and Herman Melville.
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