Department of English

About

I joined the Department of English in 2007 after three years at Penn State University. My research focuses on modern American literary studies (especially 1914-1945), American cultural studies, and LGBTQ studies as well as subfields such as critical rural/regional studies and material culture studies. I have published three books: Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism (New York University Press, 2010; Lambda Literary Award), and The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014). My essays have appeared in journals such as PMLA, GLQ, American Quarterly, American Literary History, Criticism, Public Culture, Modernism/modernity, and elsewhere. I also serve on the Editorial Advisory Board of Modern Fiction Studies, the Advisory Board of Genders, and the Advisory Committee of PMLA.

Journal Articles and Other Publications

Edited works:

The Cambridge Companion to American Gay and Lesbian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

“Regional Modernisms.” Special Issue of MFS Modern Fiction Studies 55.1 (2009): 1-194.

Autobiography of an Androgyne, by Ralph Werther. Scholarly edition of 1919 text with critical introduction, textual introduction, and textual notes. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008.

“Brokeback Mountain Dossier.” Special section of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13.1 (2007): 93-109.

Selected Articles:

“On Late-Life Samuel Steward.” Samuel Steward and the Pursuit of the Erotic: Sexuality, Literature, Archives. Ed. Debra A. Moddelmog and Martin Joseph Ponce. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2017. 68-82.

“The Sexual Objects of ‘Parodistic’ Camp.” Modernism/modernity 23.1 (2016): 5-8, 34. “Camp Modernism Forum” edited by Marsha Bryant and Douglas Mao.

“Djuna Barnes and the Geriatric Avant-Garde.” PMLA 130.1 (2015): 69-91.

“The LGBTQ Novel.” The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 8: US Fiction from 1940. Ed. Deborah Williams and Cyrus R.K. Patell. Oxford: Oxford University Press, submitted.

"Queering the American Modernist Novel." The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel. Ed. Joshua L. Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 122-36.

"Rural." Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. Rev. ed. New York: New York University Press, 2014. 217-20.

“‘Hixploitation’ Cinema, Regional Drive-ins, and the Cultural Emergence of a Queer New Right.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20.1-2 (2014): 95-113. Special double issue on “Queering the Middle: Race, Region, and a Queer Midwest” edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV, Chantal Nadeau, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Siobhan B. Somerville.

"Material Deviance: Theorizing Queer Objecthood." Postmodern Culture 21.2 (2011): 45 pars.

"Collyer Curiosa: A Brief History of Hoarding." Criticism 53.2 (2011): 159-89.

"Erotic Uncreativity: A Response to Steven F. Kruger." American Literary History 22.4 (2010): 945-50.

"Tille Olsen, Unfinished (Slow Writing from the Seventies)." Studies in American Fiction (2010): 81-99.

"Micro: Region, History, Literature." American Literary History 22.3 (2010): 626-34. (review essay)

“The Hoosier Apex.” Southern Communication Journal 74.3 (2009): 243-51. Special issue on “Queering the South” edited by Charles E. Morris III.

“Southern Backwardness: Metronormativity and Regional Visual Culture.” American Studies 48.2 (2007): 37-48. [published 2008]

“Out of the Closets, Into the Woods: RFD, Country Women, and the Post-Stonewall Emergence of Queer Anti-urbanism.” American Quarterly 59.2 (2007): 341-372. Reprinted in West of Center: Art and the Counterculture Experiment in America, 1965-1977. Ed. Elissa Auther and Adam Lerner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

“Keith Haring and Queer Xerography.” Public Culture 19.2 (2007): 329-348.

“Catherian Friendship; Or, How Not To Do the History of Homosexuality.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 52.1 (2006): 66-91.

“Caravaggio’s Rednecks.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 12.2 (2006): 217-236. Special issue on “Art Works” edited by Richard Meyer and David Román.

"Spoon River Anthology's Heterosexual Heartland." Literature Compass 3.3 (2006): 256-69.

“Willa Cather’s Lost Boy: ‘Paul’s Case’ and Bohemian Tramping.” Arizona Quarterly 60.2 (2004): 87-116.

“Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 414-427.

"Makeovers: Regional Universalism and the Newer South's Public Spheres." The Southern Quarterly 41.1 (2002): 87-105.

"The Negro Artist and the Racial Manor: Infants of the Spring and the Conundrum of Publicity." African American Review 35.4 (2001): 581-98.

Select Honors and Awards

• Visiting Scholar, Leather Archives & Museum, 2016-17.
• Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2015.
• Distinguished Young Alumni Award, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2013.
• Lambda Literary Award, LGBT Studies, 2011 (Co-winner)
• Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Indiana University, 2008-2009.
• Indiana University Trustees Teaching Award, 2008, 2014.
• Committee for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Equity curriculum recognition award, Penn State, 2007.
• Princeton University Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, 2004-2007 (declined).
• Modern Language Association Crompton-Noll Award for Best Essay in LGBTQ Studies. Honorable Mention. Awarded to “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet.” PMLA, 2002.
• University of California, Berkeley Summer Research Institute Fellow, 2000.