I taught first-year composition, workplace writing, and literature at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and first-year composition at SUNY New Paltz. My research examines how American fiction represents the persistence of the past and imagines different futures.

Teaching · Research and publications · Selected presentations · Invited talks · Service · Download my CV (PDF)

Teaching

I want my students to become better readers, writers, and thinkers, and to develop the habit of asking better questions. Learning to examine what we take for granted and put our own ideas into words helps us make sense of the world around us and participate more thoughtfully in our communities. I design assignments that give students a chance to use those skills on questions that matter to them and to see how what they practice in class can help them become the people they want to be.

Courses and teaching materials

In the grant project, groups investigate a problem connected to their intended professions. They write a letter of inquiry to a fictional funder, gather evidence and discuss it with me, then write a formal report. For the final presentation, classmates and I play the board deciding whether to fund the proposal. The format gives students a concrete reason to ask what their evidence supports and what a decision-maker still needs to know.

For the multimodal assignment, students adapt an argument from an earlier academic essay for a public audience. They choose a form such as a website, video, or infographic and decide how to reshape their research for that medium.

In a unit on foodways, students investigate food traditions in their families or communities. They conduct interviews, transcribe and code the responses, and write up their findings in an APA-formatted research report. I designed the assignment to show how systematic inquiry can deepen students’ understanding of communities they already know.

In a separate archival research project, students curated digital exhibits around historical artifacts. I built Cooking Up a Movement to model how an exhibit can connect a single object to a larger history.

The close reading assignment asks students to develop an original interpretation by examining specific details in a work of fiction. It gives them practice making a claim from textual evidence before a later essay introduces literary theory.

Teaching appointments

  • Postdoctoral Lecturer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2022–2023). First-year composition and Writing in the Workplace.
  • Graduate Teaching Associate, University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2016–2022). First-year composition and Introduction to Fiction.
  • Instructor of Record, SUNY New Paltz (2014–2015). Composition I and II.

I also taught reading and study skills for the Institute of Reading Development and worked with writers through SUNY New Paltz’s Center for International Programs and Academic Tutoring Center.

Research and Publications

Dissertation

Reading Temporality: The Present, Past, and Future of Slavery and Abolition in US Fiction Post-1945. PhD dissertation, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 2022.

I examine how contemporary American fiction represents slavery’s afterlives and how those histories shape what futures characters and readers can imagine. I use the concept of pantemporality to read how the past and the future are present at the same time in works by Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Jesmyn Ward, and others.

Selected publications

  • “‘A strange and monotonous tune’: Folksong and Symphonic Form in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Great Meadow.” In Keenly Aware of the Ceremonies of Place: Essays on Elizabeth Madox Roberts (Des Hymnagistes Press, 2017). I examine how Roberts uses folk music to shape the form of her historical novel.
  • “Whose Side Are You On? — Folksong and Solidarity in Appalachian Mining Communities.” Shawangunk Review 28 (2017). The essay considers how songs helped Appalachian miners build solidarity.
  • “The Tempest: Appropriation of Colonial Discourse and Sociopolitical Anxieties in the Caliban-Stefano-Trinculo Subplot.” Shawangunk Review 26 (2015). The essay reads the comic subplot in relation to early modern anxieties about colonial power and servitude.
  • “‘We cannot live in the houses of other men’: A Critical Reappraisal of Skipwith Cannell.” In Affirming the Gold Thread: Aldington, Hemingway, Pound & Imagism in Torcello and Venice (Florida English, 2014). I reconsider Cannell’s place in Imagism.

Selected Presentations

  • “The Tradwife of It All: Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Yesteryear, and the Performance of Traditional Marriage.” Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society Conference, October 2026. I read Roberts alongside Caro Claire Burke to ask what stories about traditional marriage leave out about the material conditions of domestic life.
  • “Rethinking Roberts for the 21st Century.” Roundtable, American Literature Association Annual Conference, May 2026.
  • “Searching for the Disaster Utopia: Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ Flood and Silas House’s Southernmost.” Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society Conference, October 2024.
  • “Steel Guitars and Six-Mabone Cars: Navigating Speculative Space and Time in Cynthia Shearer’s The Celestial Jukebox.” Society for the Study of Southern Literature, June 2022.
  • “Teaching the Controversy: Reframing Anti-CRT Rhetoric as Anti-Racist Praxis.” Presented as part of the “No Neutral Principles” roundtable on critical race theory and pedagogy at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2021.
  • “Teaching The Time of Man in the Time of Pandemic.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2021.
  • “Relief, Remembrance, Ease: Speculative Space and Time in Sing, Unburied, Sing.” South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2019.
  • “‘They endured’: Pantemporal Space in The Sound and the Fury.” The Deep South in the Global South Conference, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, April 2017.

Invited Talks and Readings

  • “Poetry, Songwriting, and the Space Between.” Guest lecture on the relationship between poetry and songwriting for Erin Elizabeth Smith’s undergraduate Introduction to Poetry course, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, September 2019.
  • “Next Year’s Words.” Featured reader, Wallkill Valley Writers, New Paltz, February 2015.
  • SAMLA Fiction Writers Panel. Panelist, South Atlantic Modern Language Association conference, November 2013.

Academic Service

  • Elizabeth Madox Roberts Society. Board member (2023–present), president (2021–2023), and vice president (2019–2021). I have also co-chaired academic programming for the society’s own conference and a joint conference with the International Richard Aldington Society and the Imagism Society.
  • University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Co-chair of the Nexus Interdisciplinary Conference (2020) and managing editor of Grist (2017–2020).
  • SUNY New Paltz. Served on the Writing and Composition Pedagogical Review Committee, Common Summer Reading Committee, and Composition I Portfolio Review Committee.

Education and Honors

I earned my PhD in English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (2022), and my MA in English (2015) and BA in English and History (2012) at SUNY New Paltz. At UT, I received the Chancellor’s Fellowship, the Norman J. Sanders Dissertation Fellowship, the W.E.B. Du Bois Fellowship, and the John C. Hodges Excellence in Scholarship Award.

Download my CV (PDF)